Funeral Blues - Titles and Versions

Titles and Versions

The first, and less widely-known, version of the poem, written and published in 1936, has five stanzas; the 1938 final version has four stanzas. Only the first two stanzas are the same in both versions. The 1936 five-stanza version was a satiric poem of mourning for a political leader, written for the verse play The Ascent of F6, by Auden and Christopher Isherwood. The 1938 four-stanza version was written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, in a setting by Benjamin Britten. This version was first published in an anthology The Year's Poetry, 1938, compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts and Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1938); Auden then included it in his book Another Time (New York, 1940) as one of four poems headed "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson"; the poem itself was titled "Funeral Blues" in this edition. (Auden never gave the poem any other title.) The text in the British edition of Another Time has a misprint, showing "woods" for the correct reading "wood"; this error does not occur in any other edition.

In Auden's Collected Poetry (1945) the poem is poem XXX in the section "Songs and Other Musical Pieces". In his Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966) the poem is poem IX in the section "Twelve Songs" in Part II, "1933-1938"; the same numbering appears in his posthumous Collected Poems (1976, 1991, 2007).