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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.



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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).



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According to The W. H. Auden Society, only Random House, Faber & Faber, and Curtis Brown Ltd. can give permission to reprint the text.





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