Themes
The main themes of the poem “Stop All the Clocks” by W.H. Auden are death and grief. Other themes that appear in the poem are about communication and man’s relationship with nature.
Death and Grief
The poem depicts the grief of the speaker caused by the death of his loved one. This grief manifests in harsh commands to an unnamed audience and by creating very dramatic images.
The narrator is in so much pain that he is not thinking rationally, demanding impossible and even ridiculous things such as preventing the dogs from barking or dressing pigeons and policemen in mourning clothes.
Though, at first, readers might not understand the speaker’s drama, the third stanza elucidates the mystery. We find out that the man who died was pretty much everything for the speaker, like a part of the speaker himself.
