Stop All The Clocks Cut Off The Telephone Analysis

W.H. Audens’ emotion provoking poem “Stop all the clocks, cut of the telephone” is a first person poem written in 1936 about a loved one.The loved one the narrator speaks of passes away leaving the narrator heart broken. The point of view helps give the audience a front row seat to the raw emotions of the speaker. The language used dramatizes the strong love felt towards the dead loved one. The author and the speaker are not confirmed to be the same person, however the intensity and passion portrayed make is seem as if the narrator is familiar with the feelings the speaker is on about. The speaker, language and theme in “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” work together to leave the impression of love, longing, grief, and sadness on the reader strong enough to make them feel these emotions and remember this poem. …show more content…
The emotion is expressed best in the narrator’s escalation through hyperbole in the third stanza regarding the love the speaker feels. They begin in minor ways with the speaker wanting to cut all the phones off and stop all the clocks. Then the hyperboles intensify when the speaker says things like “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,” (539). The third stanza between the progression of hyperboles in the first and fourth is a few lines that support the theme about how much the speaker loved the deceased. By comparing him to things like North, South, noon, and midnight suggest that this person that just died was the speaker’s everything. He was the single most important thing in her, assuming the speaker is a female, life. All of these hyperboles about how much this man affected her world and how much he meant to her accent the theme