An Arundel Tomb, a close reading

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An Arundel Tomb, a close reading

After I wrote a close reading of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ last year, I intended to write one also for ‘An Arundel Tomb’, the poem of Larkin’s that is most misquoted. I was reminded of this reading

Ian Leslie

writing about Succession in

The Ruffian

. I haven’t seen Succession (I know, I know), and perhaps I’ll watch at least some of it after reading Ian’s review; but I was struck when Ian wrote that the image of a power couple sitting in the back of the car has changed his reading of ‘An Arundel Tomb’.

The episode’s most memorable image is of Shiv and Tom in the back of a limo, like monarchs on twin thrones: joining hands, but not clasping them. The whole show turns on the differences between those two states; between an alliance and a commitment, the conditional and the permanent - and between security and affection, marriage and love, a rock and a soft place.

I wrote in my ‘Whitsun Weddings’ piece that Larkin is almost straightforward. As we will see below, the word almost occurs twice in the penultimate line of this poem. That’s what Ian is writing about here, I think, the teeming ambiguity of hands that are joined, not clasped, the almost of it. Certainly, the question of whether Shiv and Tom love each other is treated with the appropriate ambiguity in reviews.

This sort of thing is harder to see in poetry. Television is more immediate and unmistakable at presenting what Larkin called “faithfulness in effigy.” The popular misreading of Larkin (and others) works by taking the quotable idea—what will survive of us is love, or as happened to Robert Frost, I took the road less travelled by—and forgetting the tightly nuanced lines around it that change how we read the poem. The quotable line often chimes with some sentimental or romantic idea that we want to believe. Nothing wrong with that, or with those ideas, necessarily. But—they aren’t a good guide to reading a poem. They lack the almost.

There is a line is Larkin’s poem which, ironically, sums up this process of misunderstanding.

How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read

As Ian said of Succession, poems teach us how to read them. To find the ambiguity of the meaning of ‘Arundel Tomb’, we must learn how to read it. What we will see is that the ambivalence Ian describes in Succession is integral to ‘Arundel Tomb’. (I don’t know if that’s what he meant about Larkin, I’m just riffing to illustrate what I think of this poem.)

The question is, did Larkin really mean “what will survive of us is love”? The answer is, yes and no…

The earl and countess lie in stone,/ Their proper habits vaguely shown   

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