An Arundel Tomb

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An Arundel Tomb

Philip Larkin 1964

In January 1956, Philip Larkin took a short vacation on England’s south coast, during which he visited Chichester Cathedral. In the cathedral, he saw a monument to the fourteenth-century earl of Arundel and his wife that showed them lying together, hand in hand. This image was the inspiration for “An Arundel Tomb,” which Larkin began soon after his return to his job as librarian at Hull University. The poem was finished on February 20, 1956.

Larkin later discovered that the linking of hands that so caught his attention was a detail added long after the original had been completed. It was the work of Edward Richardson, a sculptor who in the 1840s reworked the memorial to repair damage it had suffered during the Reformation and the seventeenth-century civil war. The damage was so extensive that before the repairs, the earl had no arms and the countess’ right hand was missing. The two figures were not even lying together, but were placed on separate tombs. The decision to place them in the attitude that struck Larkin as significant was therefore taken over four hundred years after the work was first made, and was not the sculptor’s original intention. Larkin later commented with amusement on the historical inaccuracies of his poem, which do not affect the merits of the poem as a work of art.

As the final poem in Larkin’s celebrated volume, The Whitsun Weddings, (London, 1964), “An Arundel Tomb” has been much admired. By building on the small detail of the earl and the countess holding hands, the poem becomes a meditation on death, the passage of time, and the enduring nature of love. The final statement, “What will survive of us is love,” is one of Larkin’s most famous lines.

Author Biography

Philip Arthur Larkin was born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry, Warwickshire, in the English Midlands, the son of Sydney Larkin, who was the city treasurer, and Eva Larkin.

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Larkin read and wrote poetry and prose with enthusiasm and regularity. In 1940, a year after the outbreak of World War II, he entered St. John’s College, Oxford. He was excused from military service because of his poor eyesight, and he graduated three years later with a first-class honors degree in English. In the same year, he was appointed librarian of a small public library in Wellington, Shropshire.

In 1945, The North Ship, Larkin’s first collection of poetry, was published by the Fortune Press. It was heavily influenced by the poetry of W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. In the same year, Larkin was appointed assistant librarian at University College, Leicester, and his first novel, Jill, was published by Faber and Faber. A second novel, A Girl in Winter, was published in 1947. At that time, Larkin’s ambitions focused on becoming a successful novelist, and he regarded poetry as second best. He began a draft of a third and then a fourth novel, neither of which he ever finished. In the late 1940s, Larkin also circulated a poetry collection, titled In the Grip of Light, which was rejected by six publishers.

Larkin was on the move again in 1950, when he was appointed sub-librarian at Queen’s University in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. While there, he published XX Poems at his own expense.

The year 1955 was a momentous one for Larkin. He became librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, located 150 miles north of London, a job he was to retain for the rest of his life. In that year also, Marvell Press published The Less Deceived, which established Larkin’s reputation as a leading British poet of the postwar era. A year later, in 1956, Larkin wrote “An Arundel Tomb.”

Larkin was a jazz enthusiast all his life, and in 1961 he began reviewing jazz for the Daily Telegraph,

a job he continued to do until 1971. In 1964, The Whitsun Weddings was published to great acclaim, enhancing Larkin’s standing as a poet of great distinction. His success was confirmed the following year when he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Arts.

In 1973, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse was published, edited by Larkin. The selections reflected Larkin’s own poetic tastes and provoked considerable controversy. The publication of another volume of poetry, High Windows, in 1974, confirmed Larkin’s status as the most popular poet in England, appreciated as much by the general reading public as by scholars and academics.

In the last decade of his life, Larkin wrote very little. In 1984 he declined the invitation to become Poet Laureate following the death of John Betjeman.

Larkin died following surgery for throat cancer on December 2, 1985, in Hull, England, at the age of sixty-three.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

The first two lines of “An Arundel Tomb” describe the stone effigies of two figures, an earl and a countess, lying side by side on top of their tomb. Their faces are not distinct, and the formal, dignified clothes in which the sculptor has represented them (“their proper habits”) are shown only vaguely. One figure, the earl, is dressed in armor, which is assembled in pieces and thus shows “joints”; while the countess’ garb is probably some kind of gown that shows “stiffened pleats,” stiffened, that is, because the garment is rendered in stone. At the feet of the earl and countess, some small dogs are represented. The speaker of the poem regards this detail as out of place, almost to the point of absurdity, although he gives no reason for this impression.

Stanza 2

At first, the speaker regards the effigies as unremarkable; there appears to be nothing that draws in the spectator’s eye. He implies that in their plainness, the effigies are typical of the pre-baroque era from which they come. (Baroque refers to a more ornamental style of art and architecture that flourished from about 1550 to 1750.) But then the speaker points to a small, interesting detail concerning the earl’s left gauntlet. (A gauntlet is a long glove, used in medieval armor as a defense for hand and wrist.) The earl clutches the gauntlet in his right hand, and the observer notices that the earl’s left hand holds the hand of the countess. This detail surprises the observer and creates a sharp feeling of tenderness in him.

Stanza 3

The speaker suggests that the earl and the countess could never have imagined that their stone forms would have endured for so long. They may have believed that the image of faithfulness between them (the hand-holding) was just a small detail that might attract the attention of friends. The next line suggests that the holding of hands may have been merely an added touch by the sculptor who was commissioned to create the effigies. The creation of the intimate detail was just a casual (“thrown off”) addition to his primary task, which was to preserve in Latin the names of the two people around the base of the tomb.

Stanza 4

This stanza continues the idea begun in the previous one, about how the earl and the countess could not have imagined what would happen over time concerning their stone effigies. They would not have guessed that in the “voyage” they take through time while lying motionless (“stationary”) on their backs (“supine”), conditions would quickly change. “The air would change to soundless damage,” is somewhat obscure. Perhaps the poet means that the constantly changing air, or atmosphere, would accompany the changes that alter the couple’s memorial from its original context and intent. There may also be a hint of actual physical damage that exposure to the air over the centuries would cause the monument and the cathedral. The next line refers to the social change that would take place: the old feudal society in which the couple lived would vanish. As social conditions altered and generations passed, visitors to the tomb would no longer read the inscriptions at the base of the tomb but would instead look at the two hands clasped together.

Stanza 5

This stanza describes the passing of time since the effigies were first made. The figures of the earl and the countess persist, unchanging through all the seasons. The snows of winter come. Then the light of the summer sun fills the stained glass windows of the cathedral in which the tomb is situated, and the cheerful sound of birds singing is heard throughout the cathedral grounds, which include a graveyard (“Bone-riddled ground”). Throughout the centuries, endless visitors to the cathedral have walked up the same paths, each generation different in appearance, clothing, and beliefs and attitudes from the one that preceded it.

Stanza 6

The effect of the “endless altered people” as they visit the cathedral over a long period of time is revealed. They erode the original identity of the earl and countess, in the sense that they are no longer understood in the context of the times in which they lived. Instead, the two noble figures now live in an “unarmorial age,” which means they have survived in effigy into modern times, far distant from their feudal society, in which knights wore armor in battle, and a coat of arms depicted nobility. Metaphorically speaking, that age has slowly gone up in smoke, and the smoke still lingers in coils (“skeins”) over what remains from that bygone era. All that is left of that small portion of history—both the age in which the earl and the countess lived and their personal lives—is an “attitude,” by which the poet means the fact that the effigy depicts them holding hands. This detail is all that the modern observer notices.

Stanza 7

The passage of time has altered the couple in the effigy into something that does not reflect the truth of their real-life circumstances. The hand-holding that the speaker believes was of little significance to them has come to be their lasting and final celebration and memorial “blazon” (a coat of arms or shield). The gesture of mutual affection that

Media Adaptations

An abridged audiocassette version of The Whit-sun Weddings, including “An Arundel Tomb,” is published by Faber and Faber (1971), read by Alan Bennet.
An audiotape of Larkin himself reading The Whitsun Weddings is available from The Marvell Press, 194a Plymstock Road, Oreston, Plymouth, PL9 7LN, England. The Marvell Press also publishes an audiotape of Larkin reading his earlier collection, The Less Deceived, for the same price.

the modern observer sees, although not of historical significance, does, however, prove that the instinctive human belief about the significance and enduring nature of love is in fact true: what survives humans when they die is the love they express in their lives.

Themes

Love

The theme of love is first hinted at in the last two lines of the second stanza, in which it is revealed that the earl and his wife are depicted as holding hands. This detail is celebrated twice: the reference to the “sharp, tender shock” that the speaker feels when he first notices it, and the “sweet commissioned grace” that prompted the sculptor (so the poet supposes) to have included it. Both phrases point to the charming quality that the hand-in-hand indication of love possesses.

As the poem progresses, the theme of love develops a much stronger meaning. It transpires that it is the attitude of love in which the two figures are placed that has lasted through the ages. No visitor today can imagine what the reality of living in the “armorial age” might have been like; so many hundreds of years have passed that it is impossible

Topics for Further Study

Is “An Arundel Tomb” an optimistic or a pessimistic poem?
Why do humans wish to preserve their names on monuments after their deaths, and why do other human beings choose to visit those monuments?
Larkin once described religion as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die” (“Aubade”). Is “An Arundel Tomb” in any sense a religious poem?
If you could choose one quality that you have expressed in your life (love, courage, or honesty, for example) to live on after your death, what quality would it be and why?
Research the relationships that might exist between a nobleman and his wife in medieval times and describe how it might differ from the relationship that a modern couple might have.

to recapture the historical circumstances or the individuality of the man and woman depicted in the effigy. What catches the modern eye are not the names in Latin at the base of the tomb, which is what would have been important to the medieval mind, but the tender gesture of affection that is universal in its significance.

The poet embodies two ironies in this theme of love. First, the tender gesture that gives the monument its lasting significance is not what its subjects would most have valued, and in this sense “Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.” But the truth they now seem to embody is perhaps more deeply true than anything they could have said about themselves.

The second irony is that the poet undercuts his final observation, “What will survive of us is love,” by stating in the previous line that this instinctual belief about love that humans seem to possess may itself be only “almost true.” The poet cannot commit himself unequivocally to this vision of the transcendence of love.

And his final hesitation gives a rich ambiguity to two earlier lines, “The earl and countess lie in stone” and “They would not think to lie so long,” since “to lie” may also mean “to deceive.” Therefore, both lines can now be seen to express deception, referring either to the fact that the couple did not intend the affectionate gesture to be their lasting memorial, or that the poet’s qualified affirmation that what will survive is love is in fact untrue.

Time

Time and the sense of history permeate the poem from the beginning. The subject itself is a sculpture that is nearly five hundred years old; the stone effigy with “jointed armor” suggests a world far removed from the present. Stanzas five to seven, in particular, describe the passage of time and its effects. The fact that time moves in eternal cycles, as well as a linear progression, is made clear in stanza five. Snow falls in winter, “undated,” which means it recurs eternally and has nothing to do with the progression of human history. Then, in another season, summer’s light shines on the windows of the cathedral, and the chattering of birds is heard. Set against these eternally recurring cycles of the seasons is the linear march of human generations, as suggested by the “bone-riddled” graveyard and the “endless altered people” who over the course of hundreds of years have tramped up the paths to worship in the cathedral or simply visit as tourists.

It is time that erodes the historical identity of the earl and his wife, leaving their effigy “helpless” in the midst of an age so unlike their own. Time has made “scrap” out of their “portion of history.” The word scrap also suggests that their historical moment was small and perhaps insignificant—a scrap—when compared to the vast stretch of recorded, or unrecorded, time.

The final stanza reveals that the theme of time is intimately bound up with the theme of love. Time strips away many things, but the poem suggests (if the poet’s qualification in the next to the last line is not given undue weight) that what is lost, such as details of historical time and place, is nonessential. The essential quality that the passage of time reveals is love; in fact, time is necessary for this most enduring of all qualities to fully reveal its power.

Art

The poem is also a tribute to the power of art. It is entirely due to the work of the sculptor that the love gesture of the earl and the countess can speak across the ages. It is art that can preserve not only the figures of the past but also the vitality of tender human emotions. It is the skill of the sculptor, rather than any action of a god, that immortalizes the earl and his wife. And perhaps most importantly, art has the power not only to represent a historical moment or historical figure in a realistic manner, but also to shape them imaginatively. In this case, the sculptor of the Arundel tomb has succeeded in creating a form that embodies what humans most desire—the immortality of love—even though that goal may be unattainable in real life.

Style

Rhyme

The poem is rhymed and follows a regular rhyme-scheme of abbcac; that is, line 1 (designated a) rhymes with line 5; line two (designated b) rhymes with line 3; and line 4 (designated c) rhymes with line 6. Most of the rhymes are perfect, or true rhymes, in that the sounds correspond exactly to each other. However, on one occasion, the poet uses a partial rhyme to excellent effect. It comes in lines 4 and 6 in the final stanza, in which “prove” only partially rhymes with “love,” since the vowel sound “o” is pronounced differently in each word.

The variation neatly expresses the poet’s own ambivalence, since he is making the point that his final statement, “What will survive of us is love,” is almost, that is to say, not precisely or completely, true. The partial rhyme conveys and strengthens the hesitation. In spite of the ringing affirmation of the final line, the case for love has not been fully proved.

Enjambment

Enjambment is when a grammatical construction, as well as the sense of a poetic line, carries over into the following line. Larkin uses this device to powerful effect in the transition from stanza four to stanza five.

Referring to the couple in effigy, stanza four ends, “Rigidly they” (which is an incomplete grammatical unit). The following stanza completes the thought: “Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths / Of time,” which illustrates the couple’s continuous “stationary voyage” referred to in stanza four. The white space on the printed page between the two stanzas conveys visually the vast stretches of time through which the effigy of the couple has endured, as if they are jumping from one age to the next across a canyon of oblivion. The poet continues to use enjambment throughout stanza five, which serves to express the continuous, unbroken passage of time.

Pun

In poetry today, the pun is used more often in comic than serious verse. But Larkin twice employs the device in this serious poem. The line, “They would not think to lie so long” contains a pun on the word lie. This kind of pun is known as an equivoque, in which the same word is used with different meanings, both of which may be relevant. In this case, lie means “lie down” but also “untruth,” a meaning that the last stanza makes clear. The second pun is on the word hardly in “The stone fidelity / They hardly meant” in stanza seven. Hardly means “barely” or “only just,” but it is also a pun on the hardness of the stone in which the couple’s love is depicted. The effect of this subtle pun, for those who notice it, may be faintly humorous, the secondary meaning tending to diminish the seriousness of the primary one.

Historical Context

The Movement

When Larkin wrote “An Arundel Tomb,” in 1956, he was one of a group of young poets in England known as the Movement. The term was first used in an article in the literary magazine The Spectator in 1954. Larkin’s name was not mentioned, since The Less Deceived, the volume that made him widely known, was not published until the following year. But in 1956, poet Robert Conquest produced New Lines, an anthology that represented all the Movement poets. Nine poems by Larkin were included. The other poets usually associated with the Movement included Kingsley Amis, John Wain, D. J. Enright, Donald Davie, and Thom Gunn.

The label of the Movement was applied mostly by critics rather than the poets themselves, many of whom, Larkin in particular, were not conscious of belonging to any particular school of poetry. The Movement poets did not all know each other, and Larkin himself was well acquainted only with Amis, his close friend from their Oxford days. There were also differences of style in the work of the Movement poets. However, the label stuck, and although the Movement lasted only a few years,

Compare & Contrast

1950s: In postwar England, food rationing ends, but over the next decade, although consumer prosperity increases, the British economy is often in crisis. Britain is sometimes called “the sick man of Europe” with a habit of looking back at its glorious past rather than to the future.

Today: Britain enjoys a high economic growth rate, and no longer looks back so nostalgically at what many used to think of as the great days of the British Empire.
1950s: Britons take pride in their long cultural heritage and their pastoral vision of England’s “green and pleasant land” that “An Arundel Tomb” obliquely celebrates.

Today: Environmentalist and preservationists are increasingly concerned about the encroachment of modern society, with its industrial development and its pollution, on what remains of “olde England.”
1956: In one of its last attempts to assert itself as a world power, Britain embarks with France on a disastrous military expedition to regain Western control over Egypt’s Suez Canal.

1969: Larkin writes the poem, “Homage to a Government,” which criticizes the withdrawal of the last British troops from bases east of Suez, in places that were formerly colonies of the British Empire.

Today: Britain no longer has the power to act alone in military affairs, but operates in concert with its European and U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

most critics now agree that it did represent certain identifiable trends in English poetry of the mid- and late 1950s.

The Movement was in part a reaction against the obscurity associated with modernism in the arts. The poems of Ezra Pound and the art of Pablo Picasso were favorite targets of Larkin. Simon Petch, in The Art of Philip Larkin, quotes Larkin’s declaration that modernism amounted to

irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. That is my essential criticism of modernism … it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power.

In contrast, Movement poets avoided the experimental techniques characteristic of modernism, and returned to more traditional poetic forms. Larkin’s formal verse in “An Arundel Tomb,” which employs rhyme and meter, is an example typical of this development.

Movement poets also wrote for what they called the Common Reader. The idea was that poetry should be intelligible to everyone, not reserved only for those who could recognize literary allusions or puzzle out complex or obscure symbolism. This principle remained part of Larkin’s approach to poetry all his life, and it enabled him to gain a wide following amongst ordinary readers who did not normally read poetry.

A consequence of writing for ordinary people rather than an intellectual elite was that Movement poets prided themselves on being unpretentious and honest. They tried to use diction that was plain and not self-consciously poetic. Their idea was that poetic diction could also include colloquial language, and this type of language is frequent in Larkin’s poetry.

For Movement poets, poetry should express a realistic rather than a romantic attitude to life. In this they were reacting against the neo-romantic poetry written in the 1940s, associated mostly with the names of David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, and most importantly, Dylan Thomas. These and other poets of that period made much use of surrealistic imagery, as well as myth and symbol, and they often had a mystical conception of the sacredness of poetry. In contrast, Movement poets wanted to express a truth about life in a clear, down-to-earth way. They valued caution and irony.

England after World War II

This attitude of caution, coupled with emotional reserve, may in part be attributable to the times in which the Movement appeared. Post-World War II England was a time of austerity, and English people were deeply conscious of the diminished wealth of their nation and its loss of influence in world affairs. England seemed smaller, more insular, after the war than it had been before it, and the ambitions of poetry were correspondingly scaled down too. Large, heroic subjects were avoided. The drabness of the period is captured by Larkin in his poem “Mr. Bleaney,” written in 1955 and published in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964.

On the other hand, the security offered by the post-war welfare state, and the development of what was called at the time “consensus politics,” in which the differences between the two major political parties were sharply muted, ensured that the poets of the Movement were not much concerned with politics or questions of social justice, unlike their predecessors in the 1930s.

In the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, when “An Arundel Tomb” was published in The Whitsun Weddings, England began to become more prosperous. With its references to household gadgets, supermarkets, and billboard advertising, Larkin’s poetry of the period reflected the growing consumerism of English society.

By this time, the Movement poets had all developed in different ways. However, Larkin is often regarded as the one who stayed closest to Movement principles throughout his poetic career.

Critical Overview

When “An Arundel Tomb” was first published in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964, a number of reviewers singled the poem out for comment. Christopher Ricks, in The New York Review of Books, described Larkin as “the best poet England now has,” and said of the collection “people will be grateful for its best poems for a long time.” Ricks listed “An Arundel Tomb” as one of the six best poems. Praise came also from Joseph L. Feather-stone, in New Republic, who used the last two lines of the poem to illustrate his point that “[Larkin] is especially good at gathering up the substance of a seemingly slow-paced poem and concentrating it into enormously powerful last lines, lines that echo after they are read.” For Louis L. Martz, in The Yale Review, “An Arundel Tomb” was a “perfect poem,” and like Featherstone he also chose to comment on the last two lines:

That open utterance of the long-repressed sentiment emerges with an effect of ironic hesitation. Our modern inference from the sculptured hands is only our own simplification of the imagery: for that other age had a broader meaning in its sepulture that we can never apprehend. What remains is our own attitude, based upon the ‘almost-instinct’ of what we wish come true.

In the years that have elapsed since its publication, “An Arundel Tomb” has come to occupy an important place in Larkin’s work. Almost all book-length treatments of Larkin’s poetry accord ample space to an analysis of it. Bruce Martin, in Philip Larkin, uses the poem as an example of “the preeminence of love in Larkin’s scheme of values.” Andrew Motion, in his biography of the poet, calls it “one of his most moving evocations of the struggle between time and human tenderness.” Roger Bowen, in Death, Failure, and Survival in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, argues that “An Arundel Tomb” marks an important transition in the poet’s work, in terms of his exploration of the “meaning of death.” In his later poems, Larkin begins to express “a view of death in relation to a world which perpetually renews itself. In this latter view . . . a quiet trust is sometimes apparent, a trust in continuity, a belief in something undiminished somewhere . . . which will survive beyond his individual extinction.” Seen in this light, “An Arundel Tomb” is “an assertion about the future, a belief in some kind of spiritual survival.”

Other critics, however, have not been so ready to read the poem in such a positive light. Particular attention has been paid to the last two lines as the key to interpretation. James Booth, in Philip Larkin: Writer, writes, “The sleight of hand whereby the final line appears to be a celebration of the transcendence which the whole sentence denies is pathetically ineffective. It is as far as the poet can honestly go.” And Andrew Swarbrick, in Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, expresses a similar view: “Their joined hands do not represent the triumph of love over time, but our delusory wish that it might be so.”

Differences of interpretation notwithstanding, “An Arundel Tomb” has always been a favorite of Larkin readers. A sign of the high esteem in which it is generally held is the fact that it was one of three poems by Larkin that were read aloud at his memorial service held in London’s Westminster Abbey in 1986.

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey has published many essays on twentieth-century literature. In the following essay, he focuses on the ambivalence of the final two lines of Larkin’s poem.

Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” is many things—a meditation on death, a tribute to the power of art, a celebration of love, an evocation of England’s long traditions and history. It can also be read as a rueful expression of doubt about the conclusions to which it points. The fascination the poem exerts perhaps lies in the tension between these two opposing tendencies: the bold attempt to immortalize the love of the two figures on the tomb, and the half-retreat from that affirmation in the form of equivocation. Both impulses embody readily understandable human attitudes: the desire to believe that something essential and highly prized survives death; the dark fear that it does not. The former is a belief that springs from the human heart; the second is a product of the human mind.

The poem enacts a symbolic journey beyond the small, day-to-day identities with which the human self is normally clothed, into the values of the heart, which are universal. From the outset, it is clear that the earl and countess no longer possess any individuality. Their faces are “blurred”; their clothing only “vaguely” shown. The Latin names around the base of the tomb are no longer what catches the eye of the visitor (who in most cases has not learned or understands Latin). Countless generations of such visitors have long been “washing at their identity.”

The word washing suggests two things: erosion—the earl and the countess can no longer be perceived as who they were, in their historical context—and purification, in the sense of having been washed clean. The latter meaning is interesting because it suggests that the movement away from distinct individuality is itself a kind of progress or evolution, a stripping away of the inessential and the impure to reveal, at least through the symbolic mode of art, the essential, enduring nature of life, which is love.

In few, if any, other poems does Larkin make such an explicit statement about the ultimate triumph of love over death. Although in his verse there is sometimes an affirmative impulse that struggles to come out in spite of the weight and oppressiveness of human life, Larkin is usually a poet of misery, disappointment, stoic resignation, bleakness, fear of death, and a refusal to surrender to illusions. It is this side of Larkin’s sensibility that is apparent in the qualification that undercuts the ringing affirmation of the last line that “what will survive of us is love.”

The qualification occurs in the next-to-final line. The fact that the final attitude of the long-dead earl and his wife is one of love—they are depicted as holding hands—proves “our almost-instinct almost true.” Note it is only “almost.” The presence of the qualifier, not once but twice, makes the conclusion more problematic. It is not quite the affirmation it appears. But what precisely does “almost true” mean?

The phrase might mean “mostly true,” in the sense that a statement may be, say, ninety-nine parts true and one part false. Another possibility is that something may be “almost true” but still miss the mark and be entirely false. This possibility is hinted at in the first line of stanza seven, “Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.” The primary meaning of this line is that the earl and the countess did not, in the poet’s view, intend the attitude of love, in which they are placed, to be their sole memorial. But a secondary meaning lurks here also, that the message conveyed of the survival of love beyond death is indeed false, an “untruth.”

A third possibility is that “almost true” means “probably true,” in the sense that it has not been proved conclusively; an element of doubt remains.

A poet’s meaning can sometimes be illuminated by following the evolution of the work from early drafts to finished poem. Interestingly, Larkin’s notebooks reveal two earlier drafts of the final stanza. Both are quoted by scholar Andrew Swarbrick in his book, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin.

The first draft reads as follows:

   Time has transfigured them into
   Untruth. The stone fidelity
   They hardly meant is all that we
   Are left of them, as if to prove
   Our least accredited instinct true
   And what survives of us is love.

A still later version reads:

   Time has transfigured them into
   Untruth. The stone fidelity
   They hardly meant is all that we

   Are told, as if thereby they prove
   Our first half-hope, half-instinct true,
   And what survives of us is love.

In neither draft does the final line contain the qualification added in the final version. There is no “almost.” And yet Larkin was dissatisfied with both drafts and wrote a note on the manuscript that read: “Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years.” In other words, Larkin seemed to feel that he had not proved his case. In terms of the heart-mind dichotomy mentioned earlier, throughout the poem he has followed the direction in which the heart has led, inspired by the touching detail of the clasped hands. The result is an affirmation of the lasting quality of love. But then the discriminating, rational mind reasserts itself, demanding proof. It will always be disappointed because the final statement of principle, “What will survive of us is love,” is not something that is susceptible to proof the way the rational mind conceives it; it can only be affirmed by faith, intuition (the “almost-instinct” of the final version), and love itself. The final version of the final stanza shows therefore that the poet cannot quite bring himself to make the same voyage that he has observed and imagined in the stone figures. Unlike them, he cannot dock in the safe harbor of the heart. He must equivocate.

Two factors, however, combine to ensure that the final declaration of love’s triumph carries more weight than the ambiguous “almost” might otherwise allow it. The first is that Larkin permits the statement to stand alone, as a complete syntactical unit, as if the doubt or disclaimer is cordoned off from the affirmative vision of the heart. As Andrew Motion writes in his biography of the poet, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, “The rhetoric of the final line takes charge and establishes it as a separate truth: venerable wisdom arising from a part-medieval, part nineteenth-century monument.” It is also significant that this is the line—one of Larkin’s most famous—that readers tend to remember and quote. It would appear that the balancing act between tentativeness and certainty, withdrawal and acceptance, that Larkin carefully enacted is shaded in favor of the latter.

The second factor that encourages the transcendent meaning of the final line to overshadow the double “almost” of the previous one is the placement of the poem in The Whitsun Weddings, the collection in which it was first published. “An Arundel Tomb” was the last poem in the book, and it serves as a contrast to the first poem, “Here,” in which Larkin describes the here-and-now reality of

“And yet Larkin was dissatisfied with both drafts and wrote a note on the manuscript that read: ‘Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years.’”

the town of Hull and its environs, where he lived and worked.

In “Here” there is no escape from the city’s hustle and bustle; only the expansive view from the beach suggests the possibility of “unfenced existence,” but such freedom of the spirit is declared, at the end of the poem, to be “out of reach.” There is no escape from the pressures of the moment. In contrast, “An Arundel Tomb” looks back to a distant time, and the silence of the stone effigy conveys something beyond the feverish activity of the present. In “Here” everything is in motion but nothing is especially fulfilling or memorable; in “An Arundel Tomb” everything is still (the “stationary voyage” of the earl and the countess through time notwithstanding) and there is one single redeeming value that reaches out beyond the grave.

“An Arundel Tomb” is also in marked contrast to a number of other poems in The Whitsun Weddings, the dominant mood of which is the frustration of human hope and the ever-present specter of death. The last four lines of “Dockery and Son” provide a good example:

   Life is first boredom, then fear.
   Whether or not we use it, it goes,
   And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
   And age, and then the only end of age.

As a bleak vision of human life, this would be hard to surpass. Death is final and to be dreaded. Generally, in The Whitsun Weddings, Larkin sees the possibility of renewal and new life only in the processes of nature, such as the coming of spring in “First Sight.” But then finally comes “An Arundel Tomb,” with its brave, hand-holding gesture against oblivion, the final declaration of love’s immortality reverberating in the reader’s mind as he or she closes the volume.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “An Arundel Tomb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

What Do I Read Next?

Allison Stones maintains a web site, “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture,” http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/index.html (January, 2001), that contains photographs of medieval cathedrals in England, including photos of the exterior and interior of Chichester Cathedral, which contains the tomb that inspired Larkin’s poem.
Like “An Arundel Tomb,” W. B. Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) explore the theme that art can bestow a kind of eternity on human life and passions.
Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) is a traditional graveyard meditation from the point of view of the Christian faith.
“During Wind and Rain” (1917), by Thomas Hardy, presents a bleak, atheistic view of the cycle of life and death.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” is an affirmation of the lasting power of love that can triumph over time’s destruction.
Larkin’s collection The Whitsun Weddings (1964) contains some of his finest poetry, including “Ambulances” and “Dockery and Son,” as well as the title poem, “An Arundel Tomb.”
Larkin was invited to edit the prestigious The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, (1973), and the result proved controversial. Larkin’s selections were considered idiosyncratic, but the book was popular with the public and it gives much insight into the kind of poetry Larkin admired.
A Girl in Winter, (1947), is one of two novels by Larkin, written before he achieved fame as a poet. His young heroine Katherine Lind, a refugee in wartime England, learns that she must leave behind all her imaginative illusions before she can see life clearly.

Sheldon Goldfarb

Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, he starts with a close reading of one line in Larkin’s poem, which leads into a discussion of its portrayal of love, art, and time and a comparison between Larkin’s poem and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Perhaps the most puzzling line in “An Arundel Tomb” is the one that begins the third stanza: “They would not think to lie so long.” On the surface, it seems to have a simple meaning: the earl and the countess did not think they would lie buried in their tomb for such a long time. But why wouldn’t they think that? What did they expect would happen?

Janice Rossen in Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work answers this question by saying the earl and the countess would have expected “an imminent resurrection.” The problem with that answer is that resurrection and a heavenly afterlife, or even religion generally, are not mentioned in the poem and do not seem to have anything to do with its major issues: the passage of time and the love between the earl and the countess, as indicated by their holding hands in the sculpture of them.

Rossen does suggest another reading of the line when she notes that the earl and the countess “are close to lying in the sense of being dishonest.” In other words, as in at least one other poem of Larkin’s (“Talking in Bed”), there is a pun on the word “lie.” The earl and the countess may be telling an untruth in giving the impression, through the sculpture of them holding hands, that they were a loving couple.

There does seem to be something in this second meaning, for much of the poem is about the issue of untruth and whether love (the love between the earl and the countess, and love in general) is true. But if this is the second meaning, what about the first? Why does Larkin say the earl and the countess did not think they would lie in the earth for such a long time? Or does he actually even say that? There is another way of understanding the line, by seeing the word “so” as attached not to “long” but to “lie.” Perhaps Larkin is saying the couple would not usually think to “lie so”: that is, to lie in this manner, holding hands. They would not usually have held hands like that; they did so in this case just for the sake of the sculpture, the way people today might put their arms around each other for a photograph.

The rest of the third stanza supports this reading. It goes on to say that the “faithfulness in effigy”—that is, the hand-holding, which Larkin describes as a representation of the couple’s faithfulness to each other—was just a detail thrown in for friends to see, or perhaps only something to set off the Latin names at the base of the sculpture. The earl and the countess would not think to “lie so” long; they might perhaps hold hands, but it would not be something they would do for an extended period. And yet here they are, centuries later, still holding hands: it is close to a lie, an untruth, as Janice Rossen says, and, therefore, these two readings connect to each other.

So it may not be relevant, in reading the first line of stanza three, to think of lying in the earth at all. Larkin is primarily talking about lying together holding hands: how that is unusual, and thus something of an untruth. And yet the line does conjure up an image of bodies lying in the ground and, in fact, beginning in stanza four, the survival of the earl and the countess in their tomb becomes a central issue:

   . . . Rigidly they
   Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
   Of time. . . .

Perhaps writing the line, “They would not think to lie so long,” set off a whole new train of thought for Larkin. Even if he originally meant only to be talking about hand-holding, he began thinking about survival. In any case, the last few stanzas of the poem focus on survival and the passage of time. The earl and the countess have survived, the poem tells the readers, but it is a limited sort of survival, a survival into a world they would not know and which does not really know them. The old tenantry (a body of tenants) they would have known have vanished; the modern age is “unarmorial,” unlike the one the earl would have known. Modern visitors to the tomb cannot even read the Latin inscription and the general situation is that “altered people” unlike the ones the earl and countess knew come to see their tomb and in the process wash away their identity, leaving them “helpless.”

In the end, all that really survives is an “attitude,” another punning word, referring both to the hand-holding posture of the earl and the countess and the point of view it is supposed to convey. But the attitude is an untruth. The sculpture seems to say that the earl and countess held hands out of love, but that message of “stone fidelity” is something

“Will love survive or not? Is there hope in that gesture of the medieval couple? Or is it a delusion?”

they “hardly meant.” The poem, to this point, says that it is a lie—and yet the closing lines of the poem say that this image of the earl and the countess holding hands proves

   Our almost-instinct almost true:
   What will survive of us is love.

The overall effect is thus ambiguous. Will love survive or not? Is there hope in that gesture of the medieval couple? Or is it a delusion? Their hand-holding proves that the hope for love’s survival is almost true: not quite true, but almost. Is that a positive or negative conclusion?

Perhaps some light can be shed on the situation by comparing Larkin’s poem with another one about an ancient sculpture: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” In Shelley’s poem, a traveler reports on a giant statue of an ancient ruler. On the half-wrecked statue’s pedestal is a message from the ruler boasting about his great works, but in fact, aside from the statue, none of the ruler’s works have survived. The poem thus mocks the vanity of those who believe they can outwit death and time and survive into another age.

The earl and countess in Larkin’s poem do not boast in the manner of Ozymandias and are not mocked as a result. However, Larkin’s poem, like Shelley’s, does note the victory of death and time, which wash away the identity of the earl and the countess. Two stone effigies of the couple survive, but only “rigidly”; they are not alive in any sense; they are unable to respond to the changing world around them; the real countess and earl are gone.

In Shelley’s poem, the one saving grace in the midst of death and destruction is the truth-telling ability of art. The “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” on the statue of Ozymandias “tell that its sculptor well those passions read.” Powerful rulers may disappear, according to Shelley’s poem, but art will survive and will preserve something important, in this case a true picture of the nature of the ancient ruler, Ozymandias.

In Larkin’s poem, even this consolation is denied the reader. The sculptor in this case has lied. His sculpture may not be conveying a true picture of the earl and the countess at all. And yet the poem at the very end suggests that in some way it is true; it is true not to the relationship between the earl and the countess but to the desires of the viewers and of the whole human race: not that the countess and the earl were really in love, but that the human race has an instinctual yearning for love. Of course, even this claim is qualified in the poem; the yearning for love, the belief that love will survive, is only an “almost-instinct.”

Still, it is this almost-instinct that is embodied in the sculpture: there may not have been a true love between the earl and countess, but the sculpture reflects the human desire for there to be such a love. Art, then, becomes not an expression of the truth, as it is in Shelley’s poem, but as Andrew Swarbrick says in Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, an expression of what humans would like to be true: people would like to believe in love, in its reality, in its power, in its survival.

In the end the message of the poem is that people die, societies decay, time and death happens to us all, and even the hope that love somehow provides a means of survival is an illusion or a lie; and yet, how human beings yearn to believe in that illusion.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on “An Arundel Tomb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Sources

Booth, James, Philip Larkin, Writer, St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Bowen, Roger, “Death, Failure, and Survival in the Poetry of Philip Larkin,” in The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring 1978, pp. 79–94.

Featherstone, Joseph L., “A Poetry of Commonplaces,” in New Republic, March 6, 1965, pp. 27–88.

Graham, W., “‘An Arundel Tomb’ Restored,” in Phoenix, Nos. 11–12, Autumn and Winter, 1973–1974.

Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989.

_________, The Whitsun Weddings: Poems by Philip Larkin, Faber and Faber, 1964.

Martin, Bruce, Philip Larkin, Twayne, 1978.

Martz, Louis L., “New Books in Review,” in The Yale Review, June 1965, pp. 605–608.

Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993.

Petch, Simon, The Art of Philip Larkin, Sydney University Press, 1981.

Ricks, Christopher, “A True Poet,” in New York Review of Books, January 14, 1965, pp. 10–11.

Rossen, Janice, Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work, University of Iowa Press, 1989.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Ozymandias,” in The Pocket Book of Verse, edited by M. E. Speare, Washington Square Books, 1940, p.130.

Swarbrick, Andrew, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

For Further Study

Day, Roger, Larkin, Open University Press, 1987.

An introductory work that encourages the student to develop his or her own opinions about Larkin’s work, this book includes study questions on selected poems.

Hassan, Salem K., Philip Larkin and His Contemporaries: An Air of Authenticity, Macmillan Press, 1988.

This text is valuable not only for its readings of individual poems but for the chapters Hassan devotes to Larkin’s contemporaries, the poets Thomas Gunn, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain.

Kuby, Lolette, An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin’s Poetry, Mouton, 1974.

An illuminating study of the contents and themes of Larkin’s poetry, this work contains perceptive readings of individual poems, as well as analyses of Larkin’s relationship to other poets, both contemporary and past.

Larkin, Philip, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982, Faber and Faber, 1983.

A collection of Larkin’s own writings, including book reviews, essays on jazz and on poetry (other poets’ work, mostly, with an emphasis on British twentieth-century poets), as well as two interviews with Larkin.

___________, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985, edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993.

More than seven hundred letters reveal Larkin’s conflicted inner life. The letters shocked many because of Larkin’s reactionary political views and his alleged misogyny, but Larkin’s wry humor also makes for entertaining reading.

Poetry for Students