An Arundel Tomb
by Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits 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
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, 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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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
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 no guess how early in
Their supine 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 grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered 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
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
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.

I love this poem. I first read it when I was thirteen, in an anthology of "Mourning Poems".

Larkin does not indulge in much sentimentality or sink into high rhetoric and drama, a deep sense of poignancy is evoked within every line. Just like the effigies he describes, the poem's "plainness of the pre-baroque hardly involves the eye", but brings our attention to something beyond the surface, beyond the apparent that is so easily seen, into what really matters--"our almost instinct [that] what will survive of us is love".

It makes me wonder what the Earl and Countess truly felt for one another, did their marriage count for something more than "the Latin names around the base", written in an archaic tongue no longer used, meaning that the names, "their identity", counts for nil in this day and age? The couple are lost, out of their own time into our day, it seems that only the love, or the image of love, between them still makes sense.