Stop All The Clocks

In W. H. Auden’s poem “Stop All the Clocks” the speaker’s nihilistic views after the death of his lover are expressed in Stanzas One and Four. In the first stanza, the speaker uses the muffling of sounds as a metaphor for his detachment from reality after his lover’s death. In the fourth stanza, the speaker’s illogical demands to disrupt the natural phenomenoa reveals that the death of his lover devastated him and that the world is no longer meaningful to him. The metaphorical commands in these stanzas reveal that the world after the death of the speaker's loved one is forlorn, dark, and meaningless to him.
That the death of the lover causes the speaker to become disconnected and deranged.
The figurative language in the first stanza indicates that the death of the speaker’s lover causes him to become detached from reality. The speaker employs the metaphor “stop all the clocks” (1) to express his detachment from time. The stopping of the clock is used as the source of the metaphor to target the speaker’s wish for time to be stopped. His demand for time to be stopped reveals that the passing of time is no longer meaningful to the speaker after the death of his lover. The speaker terminates his connections with people in his life by “cut[ing] off the telephone” (1). The telephone is a tool for contacting someone, and the …show more content…
The metaphor employed reveals that the speaker seeks solitude after the death of his lover. The speaker expresses his wish to become disengaged from