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…
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Ambivalent Arundel
Larkin’s poem describes the stone-carved tomb of a medieval earl and countess, who, he is shocked to see, are holding hands.
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
The poem is about whether love survives death and whether this tomb is an image of elite feudal status or a romantic declaration. The poem is often been quoted for its final line, “what will survive of us is love”, as if Larkin really meant that. But the poem is more ambivalent:—it’s an uncertain line.
That phrase, “faithfulness in effigy”, captures the ambiguity of Larkin’s response. An effigy of faithfulness means, literally, a carved image of loyalty; but figuratively it means faithful in effigy only, i.e. a pretence, a front, an image with no corresponding reality, like what Larkin in another poem called “hold it smiles” in photographs.
To begin with, Larkin takes a very cynical approach, describing the faithfulness in effigy as done just to reinforce the feudal order. But then the end is a volte face:—the question is whether we take the ending literally, cynically deny it, or read it as uncertain. I am arguing for the latter option. From the first stanza, there is ambiguous language: “blurred”, “vaguely”, “faint”, “Hardly involves the eye”. It’s not just that “succeeding eyes begin/ To look, not read” but that the image is unclear.
Their final blazon, transfigured into untruth
To see the ambiguity, we need to look at the exact meanings of Larkin’s words. Larkin was persnickety about vocabulary. His biographer James Booth points out that once Larkin has used a word in a poem, he rarely uses it again, often never. Untruth, unarmorial, and undated are unique to this poem in Larkin’s work. Larkin consulted his girlfriend Monica Jones about this more than any other poem and according to her, the word blazon in the final stanza was her suggestion.
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.
Let’s start, then, at ‘blazon’, put in by a smart but very cynical literary critic, with more than a professional interest in the way Larkin wrote his love poetry. Blazon is an unfamiliar word, with a series of meanings. First, it is armorial, a shield or other heraldic bearing, like a banner. Larkin is pointing to the fact that without the culture of chivalry and feudalism, we see this blazon very differently. The centuries have left behind all the context that gives the blazon its original meaning and the stones are now trapped, “helpless in the hollow of / An unarmorial age.” As he said in ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, they have “a past that no one now can share.”
This loss of context is both clarifying and diminishing. We take a simpler view of the statues than their contemporaries would have done. As he said of the photograph of the young lady, lost to the past:
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.
Thus it is almost impossible for us to “read” this image correctly anymore. With Shiv and Tom, of course, we are able to read it because we have all the appropriate context of our times to help us see what’s going on. We may or may not see this as the most sincere part of the poem, but we cannot discount the fact that it is a true observation. This is central to the poem’s ambiguity. We can recognise that we lack the context, but we can only restore a little of it. We can only be modern.
Blazon also means a record, a proclamation, or, in Johnson’s phrase, a divulgation, related to blaze in the sense of blazing a trumpet to make an announcement. Something is being said here, something divulged, proclaimed. Larkin has given us,—through the disguise of description,—many, many signals of what it is they want to proclaim: “proper habits”, “jointed armour”, “gauntlet”, “the Latin names around the base”, “the old tenantry”.
Now, look at “transfigured”. Why that word, rather than change or transform or something similar? (Metre aside: he could have worked that out.) Literally, transfigure is “change shape”, further reinforcing the idea that we are misreading the image of the stone. More specifically, it means, when applied to the Transfiguration of Christ, to “elevate, glorify, idealize, spiritualize.” Something of this has passed into the ordinary meaning. God has not transfigured the earl and countess:—time has.
They are not just changed, they are given an ideal, a glorification: we impose idealised romantic love onto them. The word “fidelity”—which can refer to fealty, conjugal loyalty, and general commitment to a party or cause—reinforces this: they are just as faithful to the social order, the power structure, as to the idea of love, to each other. Their love is inseparable from their status, their fidelity from their fealty.
But, to say that the final line should be read as untrue is also over-simplistic. Monica Jones wrote, witheringly, in the draft, “Love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.” Clearly, she thought the poem was intended to be read ambiguously. As in Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, often misread, the poet changes his mind. Booth says that earlier on the poem is more cynical than can be justified—it was rare for such sculptures to have clasped hands—but that the scepticism adds to the rhetorical intensity of the final stanza.
The last line is, as Larkin makes clear at the start of the stanza, an untruth. Untruths are not the same as lies. Interestingly, untruth once used to mean “lack of fidelity, loyalty, or honesty”,—as well as false, inexact, incorrect,—so we can read that line as not just saying “time has lied about the role of love in this statue”, but as saying, “time has stripped away the role of fidelity to the social order, leaving only fidelity to each other”.
The final line is literally true: nothing else of the statue has survived. Larkin is being entirely consistent with the earlier part of the poem. Time has worn away the nuance of their love and its context, and the love is all that survives. That’s a misreading, an untruth, but not a lie. It is inexact, not wrong. I wrote about the “un-” formation recently and said,
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard uses “un-king” to describe being usurped. You cannot, of course, be un-kinged. It describes that state of both being and not being a king. What is a former king but a king?
That’s exactly what’s going on with the tomb. Love both is and is not what survives of them. It both is and is not a proper representation of what they meant. The sentimental reading isn’t wrong, it’s untrue—it’s half the story. What will survive of us is love because we aren’t able to know any other part of the truth of the distant past.
After ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Larkin wrote ‘First Sight’, which is about the other end of life, the birth of lambs, who “Meet a vast unwelcome” and are unaware of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise.” We are in a similar position with the tombs: so often the past is just as surprising as the future,—and just as unknowable. As Booth says, “the poet knows that the concluding affirmation is mere rhetoric; but its ineffectuality is precisely what makes it so moving.”