AN ARUNDEL TOMB

So ends “An Arundel Tomb”, one of the most famous poems from Philip Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings. It opens with the narrator chancing upon a medieval tomb to an unidentified earl and countess of Arundel. At first the monument appears rather uninteresting (“such plainness of the pre-baroque/Hardly involves the eye”), until he notices “with a sharp, tender shock” that the two effigies are holding hands. This gesture – and the affection it seems to embody – propels the narrator to ruminate on the sculpted couple’s iteration through the six long centuries since their monument was erected. Larkin conjures two parallel and competing processes: on the one hand, the monument’s material persistence, and on the other, the progressive erosion of the identities it was intended to convey. The “endless altered people” who look upon the tomb have become blind to the heraldic blazon and Latin inscriptions that were its raison d’être. As society is remade by changes more profound than the earl and countess could ever have imagined, so the messages they sought to convey through their monument become unintelligible to its viewers; or in Larkin’s words, “how soon succeeding eyes begin to look, not read”.

Love lies at the heart of this meditation on the historical contingency of the monument. After all, it is the effigies’ clasped hands that first attract the eye of the narrator, prompting his interest in their tomb. It is tempting to read this gesture as a sign of love’s triumph over death and its bridging of historical distance. Yet, while Larkin is susceptible to this interpretation, he also resists it. Commentators have drawn attention to the repetition of “almost” in the poem’s penultimate line as a counterbalance to its finale: “Our almost-instinct almost true/What will survive of us is love”. These finely crafted verses challenge readers to pay attention to the artificiality of the monument, just as they need to be sensitive to the constructedness of the poem itself.