Stop All The Clocks Cut Off The Telephone Figurative Language

Stop Everyone and Mourn a Death Literary devices are used in poems to help readers better understand the actual theme the author is writing about. The speaker in a poem conveys his/her own tone, figurative language, and symbols. The tone is the attitude that the speaker expresses toward the poem’s subject. Figurative language, such as metaphors, are indirect comparisons of one thing to another and symbols are objects that represent something greater than themselves. Given the definition of these three literary devices, W.H. Auden in “[Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone]” uses tone, metaphors, and symbols to construct the theme of depression in an elegy poem. Auden writes this poem in a tone of sadness and gloom, due to the passing

Auden uses a certain tone throughout the poem to highlight the melancholy sadness of the speaker’s life. The first and second lines of the poem express the immense grief the speaker is struggling with. In lines 1 and 2 Auden commands the whole audience to “stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/ Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.” Easily recognized from the start, the tone and quatrain writing in iambic pentameter demonstrates an unstable person. Auden is writing using this type of form and meter to portray an elegy or a poem of a dead person. The speaker is trying to get the audience to do that which is impossible. The tone refers to the hopelessness the speaker feels because he cannot accept that death overcomes every human. Additionally, the first three lines of the poem contain verbs that represent the overall depression of the speaker. Auden pleads with the audience to stop all of the disturbances in the world, such as clocks ticking, telephones ringing, dogs barking, and pianos playing, and focus on mourning the death of his loved one (Lines 1,2, 3). The three lines express more of the gloomy tone that causes the speaker to not be able to accept the death of a loved one; however, each sentence following hints the speaker is allowing proceedings to happen. The tone and form of writing being used by the author reiterates his depression and sadness which develops the theme of uncertainty of love and life lasting

The importance of the passed man and the speaker is defined best by metaphors in the first two lines of the third stanza. Auden indicates “He was my North, my South, my East and West” (line 9). He was also his week and weekend company. These lines proves the loving relationship between the two men. The speaker names his loved one by the directional points on the globe and like every day of the week. The speaker describes these items by way of another thing which makes the lines metaphors. Either unknowingly or unbelievingly, the author could not grasp that life is not finite. More metaphors are used to show how the speaker lost the person that makes up his everyday life, which does not last forever. The speaker implies the man was his everyday, voice, and song. Line 12 states “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” These lines seem to have metaphors that note the dead man brought conversation and happiness into the speaker’s life. He also filled every hour of the speaker’s day. Line 12, on the other hand, is demanding because the speaker says all people will die, love does not last, and people will lie awakened at night from the death of their loved one. The speaker being unaccepting to death promotes the use of the previous metaphorical devices. Each hyperbolic word is used as a metaphor to insure the importance of