An Arundel Tomb
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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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.

A copy of Larkin's Whitsun Weddings arrived yesterday afternoon in a batch of trade, and I re-read it for the umpteen millionth time in the slow wet dusk. Summer rain hammering on the roofs of all the parked cars, the street lights all on early, and the big silver fan ceaselessly spinning in the front room.

Larkin may be my favorite poet ever, arrived at as usual by unfashionable means: Grant Morrison's pilfering of the line, "A serious house on serious earth it is" as the epigraph for his "artistic" Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum.

"You've got to be kidding," said Bernadette when she found out. She sent me to the UBC bookstore to buy a copy of the Faber & Faber Collected Poems. Surprise: I liked almost everything I read, including some uncollected poems she'd clipped from the Independent or the Guardian. Even Andrew Busza's inclusion of Toads and Next, Please on the English 210 final exam didn't dim my enthusiasm.

What I admired then, and still admire now, is Larkin's unbeatable combination of lyrical imagery and emotional reserve, and those short, compressed lines. If there's a better line than

Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time

in modern English poetry, I don't know it. I admire that line for its concision; for the line break between they and persisted; for linked, which brings to mind a chain, and for the notion that time should not only be long, like a chain (and, hence, unmemorable on its own), but broad too. How is time broad? I have pondered that question every time I read this poem, and I am still not quite sure I understand what Larkin intends, unless he is suggesting is that each individual lifetime that goes to make up "time" is unique in its "breadth," in which case time is like a linked set of chains radiating out, interlocking & crisscrossing back and forth through memory.

I like, too, how the lines beginning Rigidly... seem to move the poem abruptly forward in time and sideways in tone. They make the theme of passing time explicit by radically compressing it (just as the tomb sculptor does, or just as Cormac McCarthy does in the last astonishing twenty-five pages of his Border Trilogy). You pay attention to the change but the change is not new information; it merely represents the foregrounding of material that has always been there, cast suddenly in sharp harsh light.
- posted by cjb @ 8:25 PM