Stop All The Clocks
Stop All The Clocks
Stop All The Clocks
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• Line 1: “telephone,”
Where Enjambment appears in the poem:
• Line 2: “bone,”
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. FORM, METER, & RHYME
The speaker is being a little bit dramatic here: surely, the FORM
speaker knew that love can't literally last forever. But the drama “Funeral Blues” is best thought of as an elegy
elegy, given that it's
underscores the passion that the speaker felt for the person meant to memorialize someone who has died (or perhaps just
who has been lost. The speaker loved that person so much that disappeared from the speaker's life).
the speaker thought their love would defy the laws of physics,
would transcend their individual lifetimes. It has 16 lines, divided into four four-line stanzas, or quatr
quatrains
ains.
Each stanza is almost something called an elegaic stanza; these
The speaker's dramatic streak reappears at the end of the are stanzas with four lines in iambic pentameter with an
poem, in its final line: alternating ABAB rhyme scheme. Except, this poem is actually
written in rhrhyming
yming couplets (AABB). And since these couplets
For nothing now can ever come to any good. are, broadly speaking, in iambic pentameter, they can
specifically be thought of as something called "heroic couplets."
Here, the speaker makes a decisive, sweeping generalization. As the name would suggest, this makes the poem feel lofty and
Now that the person the speaker loved is gone, nothing good literary; its form elevates the intensity of the speaker's grief.
can ever happen again. This is probably not literally true, but
Overall, the poem's steady couplets and stanza lengths suggest
again, it reveals the depth of the speaker's passion, the
a relatively predictable musical pattern. The poem feels tidy on
speaker's love. The speaker's love was so important that, in its
the surface—though, as we'll talk about more in this guide's
absence, it seems like no good will ever happen again. The
discussion of meter, things aren't actually are smooth as they
speaker's use of hyperbole thus gives the poem an exaggerated,
first appear.
dramatic flair—in keeping with the passionate love that the
speaker felt for the person being grieved. METER
Broadly speaking, “Funeral Blues” can be thought of as using
Where Hyperbole appears in the poem: iambic pentameter
pentameter. There are lots of variations throughout,
AABB