In the first stanza, the speaker describes things he would like to be stopped or cut off or prevented— things to be silenced and muted—all of which can be interpreted as symbolic of death. A symbol, of course, has both literal and figurative meaning, and so when the speaker commands his audience to "stop all the clocks" and "cut off the telephone," he seems to really want these actions to be taken and the reason is that someone very close to him as died (which becomes more clear by line 4). The speaker also orders the prevention of the dog from barking over his bone; it is as though such noise would be, somehow, disrespectful to the dead and disruptive to the process of mourning.

For the speaker, time seems to have stopped, and no one else seems worth talking to, so he certainly doesn't want to hear a dog's noise right now. He orders the pianos be "silence[d]" and the drum "muffled" so that the coffin and mourners can appear with the proper solemnity that should be afforded a person who was, to the speaker, everything: his "North, [his] South, [his] East and West" (line 9). Each of these five—the clocks, the telephone, the dog, the pianos, and the drum—is, somehow or other, a part of life and life's cacophony of activity and sound; the stoppage of their normal course, then, becomes symbolic of death.