An Arundel Tomb
Philip Arthur Larkin
Lecture 28
About the Poet
• Philip Arthur Larkin was Born Aug 9,1922,
Warwickshire, England and died Dec 2,1985, Kinston
upon Hull.
• He is the most representative and highly regarded of
the post- war British poets who gave expression to a
clipped, anti-romantic sensibility prevalent in English
verse in the 1950s.
• He was a poet, novelist and also a distinguished jazz
and literary critic.
About the Poet
• His first published poem, ‘Ultimatum’, appeared in
The Listener in 1940 when Larkin was eighteen years
old.
• Neither his first published verse collection, The North
Ship (1945) nor his novels (Jill, 1946 and A Girl in
Winter, 1947) received much critical acclaim. It was
his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived,
published by the Hull-based Marvell Press, that
brought him fame in 1955. This was followed by The
Whitsun Weddings in 1964 and High Windows in
1974.
About the Poet
• In 2003, almost two decades after his death, Larkin
was chosen as 'the nation's best-loved poet' in a
survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008, The
Times named Larkin as the greatest British post-war
writer.
• His poems show influence of W. H. Auden, W.B.
Yeats, and Thomas Hardy in the flexibility of verse
form and high structure.
• His poetry is characterized as colloquial , reflective,
ironic and skeptic and symbolic.
About the Poet
• Jean Hartley summed his style up as a "piquant
mixture of lyricism and discontent.”
• Terence Hawkes has argued that while most of the
poems in The North Ship are "metaphoric in nature,
heavily indebted to Yeats's symbolist lyrics", the
subsequent development of Larkin's mature style is
"not ... a movement from Yeats to Hardy, but rather a
surrounding of the Yeatsian moment (the metaphor)
within a Hardyesque frame".
About the Poet
• In Hawkes's view, "Larkin's poetry ... revolves around
two losses": the "loss of modernism", which
manifests itself as "the desire to find a moment of
epiphany", and "the loss of England, or rather the
loss of the British Empire, which requires England to
define itself in its own terms when previously it could
define 'Englishness' in opposition to something else."
About the Poet
• His poetry is often seen as typically ambivalent with
their prolonged debates with despair contrasted with
the energy of their language and form which give
them transcendent beauty.
• Larkin’s writing style identify him as a modernist; he
is more and more seen as a poet of high standing,
Tijana Stojkovic writes, "Philip Larkin is an excellent
example of the plain style in modern times."
About the Poet
• Stephen Regan notes in an essay entitled "Philip
Larkin: a late modern poet" that Larkin frequently
embraces devices associated with the experimental
practices of Modernism, such as "linguistic
strangeness, self-conscious literariness, radical selfquestioning, sudden shifts of voice and register,
complex viewpoints and perspectives, and symbolist
intensity".
Modernism
• It evolved from the Romantic rejection of
Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason.
Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and
clichés and became self-consciously skeptical of
language and its claims on coherence. In the early
20th century, novelists such as Henry James and
Virginia Woolf (and, later, Joseph Conrad)
experimented with shifts in time and narrative points
of view.
Modernism
• While T. S. Elliot wrote The Waste Land in the
shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land
was published in 1922, it became the archetypical
Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic
fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other
poets most often associated with Modernism include
W. H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and
Wallace Stevens.
About the poem
• This poem, written in 1956 and published in The
Whitsun Weddings collection, is based on an actual
stone monument, located in Chichester Cathedral.
• The "Arundel" of the title refers to the nearby town
of Arundel, an ancient Roman town lying in a
prominent position in hills overlooking the River
Arun. Larkin had clearly seen the monument for
himself, for the poem is characterized by the sense of
the observer who looks at the monument, walks
around it and begins to notice features as he looks.
• In this Larkin appreciates that he is only one of a
huge number of visitors, across many generations,
who have come into the Cathedral, for purposes of
worship, for spiritual guidance and consolation, or
simply out of curiosity.
• The monument is located in the Western part of the
cathedral, in a side-nave, with the two figures lying
together lit by the changing pattern of light and
shadow within the cathedral.
• The figures, which lie side by side on top of the
tomb, are Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and his
Countess,.
• A copy of Larkin's poem is now placed at the base of
the statue, so that the modern-day visitor can have
the direct experience of both poem and effigy.
• One of the distinctive features of the poem as a
whole is that it uses extremely elaborate images and
phrases to suggest the paradoxes and ambiguities
about love, human nature and fidelity which run
throughout the poem.
• The poem is written in seven stanzas, each of six
lines. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern abbcac.
The rhythm of the poem is symbolic of the slow,
inexorable passage of time, while these two effigies
lie, motionless, side by side.
AN ARUNDEL TOMB
Stanza 1
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
Literal description of stone effigies of two figures lying
side by side on top their tomb – their faces are not
distinct.
Proper habits: formal, dignified clothes
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd The little dogs under their feet.
One figure dressed in armour & thus ‘jointed’, while the
countess dressed in stiff garment.
At their feet small dogs are represented – a absurd
detail.
Stanza 2
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Baroque: style in art & architecture in Europe in 17th,
18th centuries.
Gauntlet: protective glove worn by warriors.
Initially finds the effigies typical of pre-baroque era, not
remarkable.
Stanza 2
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
Enjambement and oxymoron are used.
The stiffness gives way to gentleness and warmth – in
the alliterative use of soft ‘h’- forming the thematic
centre of the poem.
The act of earl surprises the observer & creates sharp
feeling of tenderness in him.
Stanza 3
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
The couple could not have thought that their act of
faithfulness would attract attention.
Emphasis on the length of time that has passed since
the couple was entombed.
Effigy: representation in sculpture, as on a monument.
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
Sweet…grace: the intimate detail only a whim of the
sculptor.
Thrown off: casual act
Actual task was to preserve the Latin names at the
base.
Stanza 4
They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Significant description of time change and as well as
the structure of the poem.
Supine: lying on the back, face upwards
The air…damage: reference to the invisible pollution
due to Industrial Revolution
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Tenantry: status of being a tenant
Stanza 5
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-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Use of caesuras (pause within a line often find in
enjambment) to show the passage of time – each
pause is a century or another generation.
Stanza 6
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:
The effigies as individuals are eroding – time has made
them vulnerable in an ‘unarmorial age’.
Skein: a complex tangle
Stanza 7
Time has transfigures 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.
Blazon: a coat of arms or an ostentatious display – a
heraldic term here, appropriate to the time at which
effigies were carved.
Analysis of the Poem
• Although the product of direct experience, the poem
is very much a poem about love.
• One of the distinctive features of the poem as a
whole is that it uses extremely elaborate and
developed patterning of related imagery and phrases
to suggest (and express) the paradoxes and
ambiguities about love, human nature and fidelity
which run throughout the poem.
• The poem uses words and phrases connected with
fixity and death, immobility and stasis, such as "still",
"stone", "suspended" and "bone".
Analysis
• But the poem also has a number of words and
phrases connected with change and time, such as
"history", "voyage", "transfigured" and "altered". The
effect of this is to suggest a central tension between
change and death.
• The poem also features a number of images
connected with "relationship", such as "pleat" and
"jointed", to emphasize the central image of the
relationship between the couple.
Analysis
• Finally the poem makes use of imagery and phrasing
which suggest the notion of lack of clarity - words
like "blurred" and "almost" - which emphasize the
central motif of not, perhaps, seeing clearly or truly.
• The effect of this use of imagery is to produce a
poem which is extremely rich and suggestive in
meaning, where the imagery is itself integral to the
meaning of the poem.