Religion and the Theology of Love in W. H. Auden’s “Stop all the clocks”

Abstract

“Stop all the clocks” (also known as “Funeral Blues”) is an enduring short poem of four quatrains that resists facile interpretations. Its first two stanzas originally appeared (on pages 116-17) in The Ascent of F6, a play written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood. Discussed here with reference to his Collected Poems, in which it appears (on page 120) as number IX under the title “Twelve Songs,” the poem is typical of W. H. Auden’s early verse: its first half having been severed from its original context as mere dialogue in a play, the poem’s meaning is seemingly ambiguous. In the context of Auden’s moral vision, however, the poem is decidedly religious, and its organizing theme is essentially love, understood in a particularly spiritual or philosophical sense. Much of the rhetoric inhering in the language of “Stop all the clocks” is of a Christian tenor that is both conventional and not. Take the speaker’s proclamations in the third stanza, for instance; they do no doubt connote something of a ubiquitously, if unconventionally described, divine presence: “He was my North, my South, my East and West/My working week and my Sunday rest.” The departed was the speaker’s very grounding in space and time, as God is the ontological essence in which Christians believe themselves to live, move, and have their being. The imagery is clear: he who has died organized the speaker’s cosmos as God ordered the universe with the six-day creation of heaven and earth and consecration of the Sabbath; the deceased was the speaker’s very substance of existence, as Christ, Son of God, is understood in Christology to be the blood of life. Readers familiar with Auden’s life and work will certainly concede that such a reading is plausible, for they are aware that four years after the poem’s publication in 1936 Auden returned to the Church of England through the Episcopal equivalent in America where he and Isherwood, seen off from London by E. M. Forster, immigrated in 1939. If we read the lines as religious expression, as Auden invites us to do with his decision to republish them as a freestanding poem separated from and without reference to The Ascent of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2100238