This is a group of friends that have never got married or fallen in love, but one day two of them get married. Charles, the main caracter, met in that wedding an American girl called Carrie. He speaks to her a bit and really likes her.
In the second wedding he sees Carrie again, but with her fiance. He is upset.
The third wedding was Carrie's. In that wedding one of the friends died.
Then it was the funeral.
The fourth wedding is really unexpected... It leads to a surprising ending!
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In the funeral, the man's partner reads a famous poem. This is it:
Funeral Blues.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
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.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W.H. Auden.
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W.H. Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English Literature at Church. His early poems, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were a mix of obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, and were written in an intense and dramatic tone. He then got bored of this and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes and weren't as dramatic as his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England where his father was a physician. Wystan was the third of three boys; the oldest became a farmer; the second, became a geologist. His mother, had trained as a missionary nurse.
In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, because his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.
Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".
