The two main themes explored in In the Attic and Stop the clocks are :: English Literature

The two main themes explored in In the Attic and Stop the clocks are love and loss The two main themes explored in 'In the Attic' and 'Stop the clocks' are love and loss. Both poets express their insight into the knowledge that the world will not stop regardless of the loss of mankind. This, however, is where the similarity ends. Both writers are expressing their own personal way of dealing with losing someone close to them. On Auden's side, there is bitterness in his loss, and an almost gothic romanticism of Bronte's writing despite its modern edge. With Motions however, there is more of stoicism in the writing. He writes so that we know there has been a great loss on his part, but this poem is not of the melodramatic substance, which Auden's is. Motions poem is a quiet resignation to the fact that a loved one has been lost. It has in its core, a nostalgic romanticism and sense of regret. It has in its essence a nostalgic romanticism and regret likened to that of Thomas Hardy's poetry. It is these two differences in writing style that I intend to explore. Stop the Clocks is a poem that describes a person’s loss and the deepness in which they suffer from their absence. Everything that happens around them feels as though it is ending, the clocks, and the telephones should all be stopped as in the same way that a life has stopped. Also as he says ‘Silence the pianos and with muffled drum, Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come’ it is as if they want the world to know what has happened to the poet, and that everybody should feel some pain like the pain Auden feels right now. The same is represented in the lines ‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead, Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead’, it’s the desire that everybody should know that Auden is in mourning and that nothing is going to change how he feels, should someone attempt to help him then he will simply send every message the same, I Mourn. The fourth verse is amplifying what a person meant to Auden. ‘He was my North, my South, my East and West’ this shows how much of an impact a person has had on Auden, so much of an impact that they became everything to them. The poet makes it sound as though now that person is dead, there is no more north, south, east or west to them and that there could never be again. ‘My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song’ this is as