The title does something sly. It says "Funereal", not "Funeral", and that small shift means the poem will describe a mood rather than a ceremony. The word "funeral" never appears in the body at all. No one is called dead, no one weeps, and no grief is named. We are given a silence, a bird and a light, and from these the reader has to rebuild the occasion. What emerges is a quiet argument that the most honest response to loss may need no religious words at all.
The first stanza sets the scene with a deliberate wobble in its grammar. "meeting with great quiet" has no subject, so it could mean people gathering in silence, or people running into silence as if it were someone they had come to see. Then comes the simile "as if in an urn". An urn is small, closed and made to hold ashes, yet the thing it contains here is "great quiet", something huge. That squeeze between vast and tiny gives the opening its pressure. The mourners seem to stand inside the vessel themselves, sealed in with the silence. "As if" matters too. The speaker doesn't claim the urn is literally there, only that the stillness feels like being contained.
The crow breaks that seal. "hearing a crow / took us to the light" is a slightly odd sentence, because the act of hearing is what does the taking. The listening itself is the event. A crow is no choirboy. Its voice is harsh and ordinary, and its reputation is bound up with carrion and omens, so it is a bird we might expect to deepen the gloom. Instead it leads the group out of the urn and into daylight. "The light" works on two levels. It is simply the open air outside a dim, hushed space, but it also carries the old language of death, of souls moving toward the light. The poem lets a crow's call do what we might expect a minister or a hymn to do.
The last stanza names what is missing: "wise were we that had / no itch to pray". The inverted word order, "wise were we", sounds like a proverb or a blessing, a formal cadence borrowed from the very tradition the speakers decline to follow. The word "itch" is the sharpest choice in the poem. Prayer becomes a physical, slightly irritating urge, like something that needs scratching, and being free of it is a kind of comfort. There is a question of tone here. "Wise" could be sincere, or it could be faintly self-satisfied, a little defensive, the way people sound when they insist they are fine. The poem doesn't settle it, and that uncertainty keeps the ending from turning into a neat lesson. The line break helps. "that had" hangs at the end of one line, and "no itch" lands alone at the start of the next, so the absence is the first thing we meet.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed tercets of very short lines, running 6, 5, 4, 5, 5 and 4 syllables. Its compression is close to haiku, though it doesn't follow the 5-7-5 pattern. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so the stanzas drift into each other like a single held breath, and the lack of full stops lets the silence keep going. Sound does quiet work as well. The long *o* of "crow" returns in "no", across the stanza break, as a faint echo where a rhyme might have been. "Wise", "light" and "quiet" share a long *i*, and "wise were we" gathers its own soft *w* alliteration. The poem's last word, "pray", is the one act of religious language it contains, and it appears only to be refused.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts so little. In eighteen or so words it dramatises a whole attitude to death: attention in place of ceremony, a living creature's noise in place of liturgy, and a shared "we" that suggests the feeling belongs to a group rather than one person. The poem also practises what it describes. It is short and quiet, and it leaves room around its words, so the reader ends up standing in the same silence the speakers did, listening for something to answer it.