An Arundel Tomb

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Side by side Side by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits habits Clothes 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 pre-baroque In Larkin’s pronunciation, the phrase rhymes with 'shock.' The Baroque period, exemplified by ornamentation, followed the Renaissance. This tomb was sculpted in the Middle Ages. Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet gauntlet An armored glove, worn in the Middle Ages , still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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 effigy A sculptured likeness 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 supine On their backs 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 skeins Used figuratively, a skein is a quantity of thread Above their scrap of history, Only an Only an When first published in June 1956 in the London Magazine, the line began: Only their attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon blazon Both a coat of arms, and a public proclamation , and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.