FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Blind Poets Society!
Take a look at this link :
http://club.iwvpa.net/caffeycd/funeral_.htm
Now I'm no great poet but I think there's something seriously fishy about Mr Caffrey's efforts here. For a start, as an amateur in this field, it's probably not terribly wise to attempt an 'answer' to one of the most famous poems by one of the most respected poets in the history of English literature, unless you can accept that your efforts are going to look pretty dismal as compared to the original piece.
But, more than that, I think it would have been nice for Caffrey to actually read W. H. Auden's tragically moving piece Funeral Blues before having a go at arguing against its sentiments in verse. Mostly because what Auden is expressing in his poem is the pure, raw emotion of grief - a combination of anger, solitude, love, loss and fear... these things all colliding into one another in a massive, terrible mess that is so awesome one just cannot escape from it's all-consuming grasp, by the minute falling ever further into a state of darkness, loathing and self-indulgence. The third stanza I think sums it up :
http://club.iwvpa.net/caffeycd/funeral_.htm
Now I'm no great poet but I think there's something seriously fishy about Mr Caffrey's efforts here. For a start, as an amateur in this field, it's probably not terribly wise to attempt an 'answer' to one of the most famous poems by one of the most respected poets in the history of English literature, unless you can accept that your efforts are going to look pretty dismal as compared to the original piece.
But, more than that, I think it would have been nice for Caffrey to actually read W. H. Auden's tragically moving piece Funeral Blues before having a go at arguing against its sentiments in verse. Mostly because what Auden is expressing in his poem is the pure, raw emotion of grief - a combination of anger, solitude, love, loss and fear... these things all colliding into one another in a massive, terrible mess that is so awesome one just cannot escape from it's all-consuming grasp, by the minute falling ever further into a state of darkness, loathing and self-indulgence. The third stanza I think sums it up :
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.
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.
Then Caffrey comes along with his response to this utterly heart-crushing piece of writing with a work that is as devoid of human feeling as Auden's is overflowing with grief. When I read Caffrey's piece I only get the sense that the author has no idea what Auden is talking about, either because he has never experienced anything close to the loss of a lover and a friend, or simply that his human emotional responses are switched off, replaced by denial so deep-seated that he can't find it in his heart even to empathise with the position of the speaker in Auden's Funeral Blues. Yes, I understand that Caffrey is attempting a light-hearted poem that looks at death as the beginning of eternal life with Jesus rather than as a painfully sad occasion, but this is hardly an 'answer' to Auden's stance - for a start, Funeral Blues doesn't even deal with the afterlife, simply the consequences for loved ones left behind.
