He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

These lines come from W. H. Auden’s elegy “Funeral Blues” (also known by its opening line, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”). Auden first wrote an earlier version in the late 1930s for a satirical play, then reshaped it into the grave, lyric lament best known today. The poem stages private grief as a public catastrophe: the speaker’s world has been oriented around the dead beloved, and ordinary measures of time and direction collapse with the loss. The piece later gained wide popular recognition through its use in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, which helped fix this stanza in public memory as a modern funeral reading.

The stanza compresses the totalizing experience of love and the disorientation of bereavement. By naming the beloved as every point of the compass (“North…South…East and West”) and every division of time (“working week…Sunday rest,” “noon…midnight”), the speaker admits that identity and meaning were organized around one person. The piling up of paired opposites suggests completeness—nothing lay outside the relationship. The final turn—“I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”—is brutally plain, rejecting consoling rhetoric. It captures how grief can feel like a correction imposed by reality: love may be absolute in feeling, yet it is not immune to mortality or change.