Funeral Blues

This piece of writing is from the poem "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden. Some of you may recognize it from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. It is about the death of a loved one and the feeling that the entire world needs to pause. I love the entire poem, but I will just quote the last two stanzas because I think they are the most powerful:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I think this poem is incredibly powerful. It definitely conveys the emotion that since this person has passed, nothing matters anymore. It is definitely an effective appeal to pathos. I also think that the punctuation plays a major role in conveying the feeling of the poem. The constant use of commas in the first stanza set a pace of desperation and longing. In the last stanza the semi-colons set a tone of reverence. I also really love the verb usage in the last stanza; "pack", "dismantle", "pour", and "sweep" create great images and make the poem even more dramatic.