The Film That Made a W. H. Auden Poem Cool
This romantic comedy catapulted a poem penned in 1936 to the top of our cultural consciousness in the 1990s, and its influence is still being felt today.
Pop culture can be a powerful vehicle to expose new readers to poetry, and the story of W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” (also known as “Stop All the Clocks”) and its inclusion in the 1994 romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral is perhaps one of the most famous examples of this power.
For the uninitiated, Four Weddings and a Funeral is way up there in the category of classic rom-coms. It’s also routinely cited not just as a great rom-com, but as one of the best British films ever. Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, the film cost nothing to make, was shot in a crisp six weeks, and has been a favorite of generations of romantics.
I think the film has its problems, but its impact is undeniable. Even scholars credit Four Weddings with re-popularizing the work of W. H. Auden: in the introduction to the 2000 anthology 100 Great Poems: Favourite Poems and Their Poets, anthologist Fiona Waters notes that the film helped “Funeral Blues” re-enter the public consciousness in a huge way and even made it “cool.”
The poem itself holds up, as all great works of art do, and is worth learning whether you’re in love, grieving a loss, or anywhere in between.
The Poem
“Funeral Blues” was originally written in 1936 as part of Auden’s play The Ascent of F6, which was co-written with his frequent collaborator Christopher Isherwood. In that play, an earlier version of the poem functions as a kind of snarky lament for a dead politician. But later, Auden revised the poem as a piece of one of the original players in The Ascent to sing as a kind of cabaret song composed by Benjamin Britten. It’s nice to have talented friends!
Since that time, the poem has lost its original flavor and has lived on as a more earnest expression of love and loss. The poem’s final version is so moving because it imagines a world that is as arrested by pain and loss as the griever himself.
Here’s the full text of the poem, which is read in its entirety in the film.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
—W. H. Auden“Funeral Blues” captures perfectly the bereftness one feels when enduring a great loss. What’s the point of any of it? says Grief: the stars, the moon, the ocean, the wood. Fuck it all. Worthless.
The poem’s graspable rhyming couplets marshaled into quatrains set up a pattern of expectation that is quickly and comfortingly fulfilled. The rhymes are also perfect rhymes rather than half or slant rhymes, which further increases the straightforward, serious, and funereal feel of the poem.
“Funeral Blues” is an unpretentious poem of mourning from a complex poet. Once it got wider exposure, its charms held it in the popular imagination for years.
The Four Weddings and the All-Important Funeral
Four Weddings and a Funeral takes place in the span of 15 months in England and Scotland, where a group of friends attends several weddings and, of course, a funeral. The group is close-knit and mainly takes the view that weddings are as enjoyable as they are tedious. Each of the group members has their own private struggle when it comes to the issue of finding love and partnering off. Marriage, of course, is treated as a requisite: something that must be done. And by the film’s end, we understand that all of the friends are either married or on their way to the altar. Except, perhaps, for the main character.
The funeral at the center of the film is the catalyst that drives bumbling, can’t-quite-commit protagonist Charles (Hugh Grant) toward his ultimate destiny. During the third of three weddings filled with exes and unavailable beauties like main love interest Carrie (Andie MacDowell), Gareth (Simon Callow), one of the members of the group of friends at the center of the film, suddenly dies of a heart issue.
At Gareth’s funeral, his partner, Matthew (John Hannah) is introduced as his “friend.” It stings. It also feels a bit like a nod to Auden’s own homosexuality: he entered a marriage of convenience with a woman in order to help her attain a passport and escape Nazi Germany but maintained a lifelong relationship with the poet Chester Kallman.
But where Matthew’s introduction failed to show the depth of their relationship, the poem succeeded. The entire congregation is deeply affected, and John Hannah’s reading has the power to wrench a tear from even the driest eye in the audience.
Charles is shaken by his friend’s sudden death and his funeral. But it’s bizarre that, when confronted with a poem that obviously recounts the loss of a deep and passionate love, Charles’ epiphany isn’t that’s what I want: a true love. Instead, he says maybe all this waiting for one true love stuff gets you nowhere. He has absorbed the lesson that life is short from the funeral but not the lesson that deep and powerful love can be worth waiting for.
So what does Charles do? He shacks up with an old girlfriend he kind of doesn’t like, gets engaged, and is set to marry her in the fourth wedding of the film, set ten months after Gareth’s funeral. But when his true love, Carrie, shows up, things get interesting. The question of what true love is and what its relationship is to marriage is something the film wants to believe it has engaged with, but really doesn’t.
In an early scene, Charles says during a wedding toast:
I am, as ever, in bewildered awe of anyone who makes this kind of commitment that Angus and Laura have made today. I know I couldn't do it and I think it's wonderful they can.
Charles can’t commit to the idea of marriage, then, but apparently can commit to a lifetime with the same person, as we learn in the film’s closing scenes. It’s unclear what his precise objection, then, is to marriage, other than the sometimes gaudy spectacle of the wedding itself.
But whatever shortcomings the film has in terms of its characterization, it nonetheless succeeded in endearing a generation to a poem written before WWII, which is a pop culture victory.
Get Meta: “Funeral Blues,” Four Weddings, & The IT Crowd
The exposure that the film gave to the poem was so great that nearly 15 years later, the cult-favorite British sitcom The IT Crowd (one of my favorite shows of all time) had fun parodying not the poem, but the fact that people came to learn of the poem through watching Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The show is about the three-person IT department of a poorly managed British corporation. In Series 2, Denholm Reynholm, the CEO of Reynholm Industries, dies (or rather, walks out of a skyscraper window when confronted with the fact that there are “irregularities in the pension fund.”)
To my mind, ’tis better to learn a poem from a movie than to never learn it at all.
In this scene from Series 2 Episode 2, “Return of the Golden Child,” Derek Pippen (Silas Carson) is reading a eulogy for his boss. He begins this way:
Pippen is a major tool. It’s fitting, then, the show seems to suggest, that he learned about the poem not through reading Auden but from watching a movie. The joke here is that Derek is stupid and sucks, and his acquisition of the poem via a popular rom-com is evidence of his stupidity and his sucky qualities.
But should we laugh when the laugh track asks us to, here? Isn’t it a bit like making fun of someone’s mispronunciation because they learned a word through reading it rather than hearing it? To my mind, ’tis better to learn a poem from a movie than to never learn it at all.
At any rate, we only get half of the poem’s first line before Douglas (the incomparable Matt Berry) bursts in and disrupts the proceedings. But the implication that Four Weddings is still introducing people to Auden is alive and well.
Pop Palate Cleanser
Though she was as maligned as she was revered, W. H. Auden once called poet Laura Riding, sometimes known as Laura (Riding) Jackson, “our only living philosophical poet.” In a kind of inverse of Auden’s own movements, Riding was born in America and spent lots of time on the other side of the ocean. Her intellectual pursuits and artistic pursuits were serious and tumultuous, and based on the number of accounts of contemporaries who disliked and maligned her, one might conclude that she was likely quite spirited and wonderful.
Her time spent in Europe in the orbit of Robert Graves and his wife resulted in a suicide attempt and a literary scandal that’s the subject of a recent film which I plan to cover in a full post for PopPoetry.
A poet of immense talent and intellect, Riding preferred free verse and modernist experimentation over the more traditional verse still being penned in her time. Riding maintained that Graves may even have stolen and appropriated her language and poetic “substance.” In a 1967 letter to the editor of the Minnesota Review, Riding wrote:
…the White Goddess theme was a spiritually, literarily and scholastically fraudulent improvisation by Robert Graves into the ornate pretentious framework of which he stuffed stolen substance of my writings, and my thought generally, on poetry, woman, cosmic actualities and the history of religious conceptions.
(Reprinted in The Person I Am : The Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eds. John Nolan & Caroll Ann Friedmann)
Deepening her cool avant-garde bitch status is the fact that Riding even renounced poetry at one point, later outlining her reasons for this departure in a broadcast for the BBC. More to come on this in the future post I mentioned!
Below is one of Riding’s poems, which contains a penetrating description of the pain that lovers feel: “Who but lovers / Who but unslaked lovers may be starved so?”
Have you ever been introduced to a poem by a film, song, or television show? Are you into Laura Riding’s work? Do you also think Charles is kind of ludicrous in Four Weddings? Let me know in the comments!