Stop All the Clocks by W.H. Auden

Stop All the Clocks by W.H. Auden

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Wystan Hugh (formally known as W.H) Auden was born in York, England,

in 1907. Influenced by the work of Emily Dikinson, Robert Frost and

some other poets, he published his first book of verse in 1928. Ever

since, he has been recognized and admired for his incomparable

technicality and his ability to write verses in many different forms.

"Stop all the clocks" is one of Auden's most prominent poems; this

lyrical ambiguity is what I will be depicting throughout this

commentary. At first, when I read the title "Stop all the clocks", I

was quite confused at what it could mean. I knew that it had to be

figurative in some way since it didn't make any sense otherwise. I did

not realize, until later, that I was quite wrong. It was not only the

way the poem commenced, but it mostly portrayed the standstill of time

in a slightly blunt way. The poem is actually about the death of a

loved one, and the emotion of the person's lover (who is the speaker).

I did not know this, however, until I had read the poem completely.

Before I began to analyze this poem, I decided to first dissect the

rhyme scheme. It was one of the most simple and basic rhyme schemes I

had ever come across, being "a / a / b / b / c / c / d / d / e / e / f

/ f / g / g / h / h". I decided that there was nothing spectacular

about this, except that later I found it added a dull rhythmic

emphasis, or a sense of atmospheric gloominess. Once I had gotten that

out of the way, I began to analyze the first stanza. As I mentioned,...

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...and moon away like it were a simple

act.

The whole poem in general gives the reader (me) a very sorrowful feel.

I felt very empathetic to the sufferer as he/she seemed to love the

person very much. Something else that irritated me while writing this

commentary after reading the poem is the question "Is the speaker a he

or a she?" By line 6, we know that the dead lover is male. Normally by

this, one would assume that the speaker would be female (a mistake

that I made in the beginning). However, doing some background research

on the author, Auden, I discovered that he was bisexual. This actually

made me wonder whether the speaker could be a he. Thus, the mystery

still remains. Although this poem seemed quite simple and

straightforward to me, I found out that it is quite inexplicit as well

in its own mysterious way.