If you've ever seen Four Weddings and a Funeral, you've heard this poem. I encountered it for the first time in that movie and loved it ever since for its passion and its use of detail to make us feel the grief of the speaker. Read the poem here.
I like "Funeral Blues" because of its selfish portrayal of love and grief. The love that the speaker felt for the lost lover was world-changing. The lover became the speaker's cardinal directions, the way the speaker oriented himself in the world. And the grief is just as self-centered. The whole world, people, animals, inanimate objects, are all changed by the loss. This view is of a person wholly consumed by emotion and seeing the world, because he sees himself and his lover as the center of it, as wholly consumed.
Click below to listen to my reading of the poem.
9/27/10
