‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘About His Person’: write about these poems and their effect on you.
Show how they are similar and how they are different.
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Both poems deal with the idea of the value and significance of human life. In ‘Funeral
Blues’, Auden writes: ‘The stars are not wanted now’, which could imply that the person
who has been left behind is struggling to deal with the reality of living beyond their
partner’s death, and that they are reflecting on the time they have spent together. The
mood of this final stanza is one of fatigue: the uniform, rhythmic lines and rhyming couplets
(‘one/sun … wood/good’) lull the reader into a strong sense of calm. This stanza has a
lullabic effect. However, in ‘About His Person’, Armitage creates the impression that very
few, if any, people care about the person’s death, thus suggesting that the person’s life was
ultimately meaningless and potentially unfulfilling. Their life has been reduced to a few
meaningless possessions: ‘five pounds fifty in change … a library card … a postcard … a
pocket sized diary’, and a few other insignificant items. These items may suggest … I feel …