Stop All The Clocks Poem Analysis

Referring closely to the language of the poets, explain how loss is presented in “Stop All The Clocks” and “The Voice.”

“Stop All The Clocks” by W. H. Auden expresses a dramatic, immediate response to the death of his partner. Thomas Hardy writes “The Voice” to profess the remorse he feels, after his wife dies while their relationship was on bad terms and estranged. Both Poems are written in four stanzas of four lines. Each stanza in “The Voice” highlights the different stages of grief. The first stanza introduces how he believes his estranged wife speaks to him “how you call to me.” He then continues to have flashbacks and remember her “Even to the original air-blue gown!” In the third stanza he questions whether it truly was her calling “or is it only the breeze,” making me believe he is in a form of denial; he begins to dismiss the thought of her death, as he his remorseful of how the relationship ended before her death. The poem follows an abab rhyme scheme throughout but in the last stanza the rhythm changes; rather than flowing in long sentences, the sentence become shorter and Hardy uses a semicolon to create a pause “Thus I; faltering forward” the last stanza demonstrates him moving on. In contrast to Hardy, Auden in “Stop All The Clocks” conveys no sense of moving on, throughout the stanzas. Auden instead uses each stanza to communicate how the death of his partner has affected his life and the emotions he is experiencing, Auden opens the poem with the title,