Funeral Blues by Wystan Auden is an emotionally depressing poem about a death that was very personal to him. The theme of the poem is about the emotions that are brought along with the death of a loved one and the effect that it has on somebody’s mind. The poem is centred on a funeral and the silence and solemnity that surround the event. Funeral Blues has an emotionally down bringing atmosphere due to the poet’s description of his emotions such as “For nothing now can come to any good”. Overall Wystan Auden’s poem cleverly integrates the auditory techniques to describe the silence with the own emotional emptiness that he is feeling. Funeral Blues has a number of imagery techniques to describe the solemn occasion of the funeral. In stanza two Auden describes two planes “Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,” This use of personification gives the planes human qualities to “scribble on the sky”, although in reality the planes are letting of gas to create a message in the sky. This emphasises how large the funeral is and how important the dead man meant to the poet. “Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves” also helps to visualise the greatness of the dead man as the releasing of public doves often meant that the death was of a person of significance and importance. Auden goes on to describe the dead man as “my North, my South, my East and West”. This is a metaphor as Auden is comparing the man to a moral compass or a major directing factor in his life. This use of figurative