The speaker of "The Funeral" begins with an admission of failure: "I tried smiling." The verb is "tried," and the smile is a tool, a way "to avoid the choking weeds of grief." The poem then asks whether any comfort, whether a smile, a vodka or a beautiful dream, can hold grief back. Its answer, delivered in the last three lines, is that it can only do so for a moment.
The central image is a garden under siege. Grief is weeds, a plant that strangles. Late in the poem the speaker dreams of "roses red & white" flowing from the dead person's hips, "replacing the weeds & / loosening their grip." The garden metaphor is set up in the first line and paid off near the end, which gives the poem a tidy emotional arc. But the relief lasts only "just long enough," and the poem's final stanza removes it.
The middle of the poem turns on a small act of kindness. Asked by the dead person's daughter where they have gone, the speaker says they have "become one with nature," pointing to flowers, sunlight and "all those dignified trees." The speaker is trying to guess what the dead would have wanted to hear, "believing / you would like that answer," and then worries: "I hope I wasn't wrong." Notice how the dream later acts out this answer. The body does literally blossom, and limbs appear everywhere. The trees have "limbs" that veil and reveal the sky, the sunlight has "lambent limbs," and the body in the dream dances. The repeated word links human and natural worlds, so the consoling story told to a child is made vivid. Yet it comforts the speaker only briefly. What works for the daughter does not fully work for the adult who must live with the "absence."
The poem's form fits this restraint. It is free verse with no regular rhyme or metre, and its short lines, often only a few words, give it a halting, breath-catching pace. "Singing" and "silence" each get a line to themselves. The long, drifting sentence about the trees and the road, by contrast, mimics the speaker's slow, numbed walk to the building where the family mourns. The parentheses matter too. The conversation with the daughter is boxed off in brackets, as if it were too private or fragile for the main text. The vodka comes in a different kind of bracket: "A vodka (double vodka)," then "& another / (& another)." The speaker corrects the count, then loses it. The ampersands add to the sense of hurry and blur, and the drinking is told with a dry, unshowy honesty that shows more than a long description of misery would.
The sound of the ending is carefully managed. Among the poem's soft, flowing images, "the prosody of your body" is a playful chime, a poetry term used for a living body in motion. Near the end, three words share the same closing sound: "absence," "eloquence," "silence." The poem finally rhymes just as the dream collapses, so the chiming feels closed and final rather than musical. The phrase "brutal eloquence / of silence" is also a paradox. Silence normally says nothing, but here it speaks more forcefully than any eulogy or comforting lie, and it is "brutal" because it cannot be argued with.
The contrast between inside and outside is worth noticing as well. The opening landscape is gentle: trees "no longer naked" and a "diamond-clear sky." Judging by those details, the season may be turning toward spring, though the poem never says so. Later the sunlight is "cold bright," beautiful but unwarmed. Nature is offered as consolation but never fully delivers it, and the poem lets that tension stand. The speaker does not claim the dream was real; the dreaming happens after two or more vodkas, and the reader may suspect that the relief was partly chemical.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about consolation. It does not end with acceptance or a wise lesson. It gives the smile, the lie to the child, the drinks and the dream, then shows that none of them fills the space where a person used to be. The poem sets its most beautiful imagery against its plainest ending, and in doing so it suggests that grief is not defeated by lovely thoughts, only briefly interrupted by them.