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 partmedieval, 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 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:
Jennifer Smith and Elizabeth Thomason, Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry, Volume 12, Philip Larkin, Published by Gale Group, 2001.
Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “An Arundel Tomb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.