Funeral blues
Funeral Blues ( "Funeral Blues " ) is a poem that the English writer WH Auden published in 1936.
Emergence
The poem, which Auden himself had not given a title, but which appeared in an anthology published in 1938 with the title Funeral Blues , is available in two very different versions. The little-known original version has five stanzas . Auden wrote the original five-verse version in 1936 as a parody of a funeral poem for a political leader in the poetic drama The Ascent of F6 , which he wrote with his friend Christopher Isherwood . The two first stanzas are identical in the four- and five-line version, but the end is completely different in content.
The four- verse version was created to be sung by the English soprano Hedli Anderson in an arrangement by the composer Benjamin Britten . This version was published in the anthology The Year's Poetry, compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts and Geoffrey Grigson , in 1938 and in Auden's book Another Time , and was titled Funeral Blues , while the five-verse version has no title. In the issue of Another Time for the United Kingdom , there was a misprint: instead of the correct wood in the fourth stanza woods written. This error does not appear in any other issue.
Adaptations
- Benjamin Britten published settings of several Auden poems under the title Cabaret Songs , including Funeral Blues .
- In the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, Matthew reads the poem at Gareth's funeral.
- The poem is the English contribution to the memorial stone of the Heysel disaster , in which 39 people were killed in 1985.