Extract

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.

Stop all the clocks. The command is absolute, and grief demands nothing less than the rearrangement of the entire world. Auden's poem, originally a satirical cabaret piece, was revised into the devastating elegy most readers know, a lyric in which love's loss requires that stars be put out and the ocean swept away. The stanzas escalate from the civic to the cosmic, each demand more impossible than the last, until private sorrow has consumed all creation. The formal control, the steady iambic pulse, the neat quatrains, becomes the thing that makes the emotion bearable. Millions encountered it through a film, but the poem belongs to something older: the ancient need to make language adequate to loss. Nothing now can ever come to any good.