“Does a notoriously grumpy poet believe in everlasting love?”: Jeremy Axelrod on Philip Larkin’s classic “An Arundel Tomb”
by Ernie on 30/10/09 at 9:28 am
From the Poetry Foundation.
The last line of “An Arundel Tomb” is among the most quoted in all of Larkin: “What will survive of us is love.” Its popularity can seem ironic. Larkin is mainly known for the dry eloquence of his gloom, and for the sly precision of his phrasing. A line so keen on love looks odd, even mawkish, coming from Larkin, for whom starry-eyed imagery, as he wrote in “Sad Steps,” was “High and preposterous and separate.” Yet “An Arundel Tomb” is not a sentimental poem; it is about what sentimentality looks like the morning after. Its last line, in fact, distills a romantic notion that Larkin has challenged almost from the poem’s beginning. He lets it resonate through the whole poem so he can hear what it sounds like by the end. And while Larkin unravels, somewhat, the conviction that love survives, he also shows that it has an inevitable ring of truth—if only because we want so much to hear it.
Finished around 1956, the poem describes a 14th-century table tomb that Larkin saw in an old cathedral (for an agnostic, he bore churches no small affection). On top, two stone effigies, sculptures of the earl and countess within, lie “Side by side.” Their quaint “plainness”
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
Over the next few stanzas, Larkin follows that sculptural flourish through centuries of corrosion, imagining the tomb, from its creation onward, in a kind of time-lapse footage of wear and tear, the seasons cycling on as the air changes “to soundless damage.” The couple’s sculpted faces are “blurred” by the years, but much more so are the substance and meaning of their lives. While their tomb merely fades, the world they lived and died in disappears. The friends who remember “The Latin names around the base” of the tomb don’t last long; nor does “the old tenantry” of the churchground. Fewer and fewer people remain to appreciate their tomb as a tomb rather than a historical site. The place shifts, in other words, from a token of their memory to a monolith of their age. “They would not guess,” Larkin muses in the fourth stanza, “How soon succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read,” noting the way people view a tomb they regard as an artifact; to look, not read, is to ignore the particulars of something in favor of a sheer visual impression, a sharp tender shock.
Click here to read the full essay.
“An Arundel Tomb” by Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
