What’s Up With the Title?

The poem is called "Funeral Blues," and Shmoop thinks that's the perfect title. After all, it's a sad song (blues) about a dead guy (funeral). Done and done.

As we discuss in our "In a Nutshell" section, the song was set to music before it was published as a poem. Sure, it may not be bluesy in a musical sense—it really sounds much more operatic to us—but the title definitely draws out the poem's connection to music, and the blues comes from the emotion of it, rather than the rhythms. To get a sense of what we mean, check out a musical rendition of the poem.