Life isn't all about politics. Life is sometimes about poetry.
This poem has a lot of meaning to me:
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 plainess 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 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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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 could see:
A sculptor's sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their 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 grass. 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 finality
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.
-- Philip Larkin
My English teacher told us that this is one of Philip Larkin's most misunderstoof poems, but i couldn't remember why so i picked myself up a poetry book and had a look. I hope that you read the poem too and have some thoughts.
Philip Larkin was a man who appreciated irony, who was obsessed with death and whose poetry has had a great effect on me.
Arundel Tomb, despite what is commonly believed, is not a poem with 'the happy ending' that Larkin seems to be missing. The poem is one of falsehood and dishonesty, one which reflects on the passing of time and a void of love in our world, or at least in Larkin's. To me the poem reveals an insecurity that runs deep within us; that nothing actually survives of us, not love, not a memory, nothing.
The couple with their 'faces blurred' have become nothing but a part destroyed stone carving in a cathedral where people 'wash away' at their identity. The partners who lie together come from an age of stiffness, of tradition and lovelessness and could be seen as a sign of 'love' in a 'loveless age'. The reality of this poem is however not so rosy. The couple 'lie' side by side, a pun of course, as their very existence, dead together and holding hands is a falsehood- love has not survived but in fact their 'love' was a fallacy, a lie.
I have so much more to say, but too little time.
