I propose a thought experiment as to the role of the truth in poetry. Phillip Larkin’s celebrated poem, “An Arundel Tomb” is the vehicle for this inquiry.
“An Arundel Tomb” was the final poem in Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings published in 1964. This book is characteristic of Larkin and contains many of his finest poems. The verse is valedictory and may be interpreted as summarizing themes articulated in the book. “An Arundel Tomb” is widely available on the Internet. The Poetry Foundation shows the poem with annotations as to unusual or technical words that appear in the verse. On You-Tube, Larkin reads the poem so that you can hear his intonations. As one might expect, Larkin’s reading is without affectation, sober with a slight inflection of amusement, and articulated with absolute clarity.
The poem is ekphrastic – that is, descriptive of a work of art. The poet surveys a medieval sarcophagus in an old church. Two life-size figures, evidently a married couple, are carved into alabaster lying side-by-side atop the stone coffin. The husband is dressed in the armor of a knight. The woman wears a pleated gown. Time has blurred both of their faces, features that were only indifferently carved in any event. The stone knight and his lady are generically represented and not individuated as portraits. The poet notices that both of the figures have small dogs at their feet, a prosaic and “absurd” touch we are told. (The dogs apparently represent fidelity, but, also, perhaps are a comment on the chill invading medieval castles in the Winter – the figures may be warming their feet on the dogs.)
To those who made the statue, the carved effigies were intended to be hieratic, stiff, formal, like emblems on a coat of arms. There is nothing lifelike about them. But the poet notices with a “sharp tender shock” that the knight has set aside the gauntlet on his “left hand” so that “his hand withdrawn (is) holding her hand.” (The “sharp tender shock” is semi-facetious allusion to the “short sharp shock” imagined as death by beheading in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.) Immediately the poet minimizes this tender gesture – he describes it as a kind of indulgent bagatelle by “the commissioned” sculptor, a “grace note” that only “friends’ of the deceased couple would note. The detail of the figures holding hands is intended to “prolong” the Latinized names written below the effigies – that is, a punctum, or point of interest, that fixes the sculpture in one’s mind and makes it memorable.
Larkin observes that the sculpted sarcophagus was intended merely to supplement what can be “read” from the inscription – that is, the identity of the deceased husband and wife. Their names were once of interest to the “old tenantry,” now as defunct as their lord and lady. Succeeding generations who visit the stone casket have no interest in the names written on the stone – they have come “to look” at the artwork and “not read.” In some of Larkin’s most ravishing verse, he describes the “soundless damage” of time and imagines the visitors to the church in “the hollow of an unarmorial age” like a “slow suspended skein of smoke” that washes at the identity of the alabaster figures, slowly eroding them into an abstract “attitude”. (The effect is like time-lapse photography in which we see the visitors to the tomb as ghostly evanescent presences hovering over the motionless ancient carvings.) Larkin asserts that “time has transfigured them into untruth” – by this, he means that the sculptor’s whim, the “hardly meant” gesture of the hand-holding (with a pun on “hard” as durable), has now become “their final blazon”, that is, the “almost instinct” that “what will survive of us is love.”
Larkin is the most unsentimental and cynical of poets and he makes every possible effort to undercut the poem’s explicit theme – that is, that love is somehow more powerful than death. Hence, he words the final stanza in language that is conditional and, indeed, almost legalistic in the way that it hedges skepticism about the final line: “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.” The mass of equivocations preceding the final apothegm is astonishing: the posture of the Lord and Lady is an “Untruth” (with capital “U”); those erecting the monument “hardly meant” the sarcophagus to be the warrant of fidelity; our reading to that effect is the result of an almost-instinct that is not “true” but almost true. In other words, we impose our instinctual sentimentality on the crudely sculpted primitive figures on the stone casket. The slant rhyme between “prove” and “love”, a dissonance insisted-upon by Larkin in his reading, further makes the point: what we see as central to the “attitude” of these figures was only incidental to them. Marriage was dynastic to the ruling class in medieval times – perhaps, the lord and lady scarcely knew one another, or, even, heartily disliked their marital duties.
In some ways, Larkin’s reluctance to let his aphoristic final line about love surviving death stand as the meaning of the poem echos Auden’s similar disapproval of one of his own most famous poems, “September 1939". Auden’s verse contains the famous lines: “Hunger allows no choice / To the citizens or police / We must love one another and die.” Auden thought these lines unconscionably sentimental and, even, dishonest, characterizing the poem as a whole “as trash” that the poet was “ashamed” to have written. A similar instinct is at work within the text of “An Arundel Tomb.” Time and our own sentimental instincts has “transfigured” the figures into “Untruth” – transfiguration into “Untruth” is itself a remarkable concept; normally, we would expect a transfiguration to result in something true, not a lie. In our “unarmorial age”, we will misread the tomb according to our own sentimental attitudes toward romantic love. Larkin is anxious that his poem not be similarly “misread” – hence, the fog of qualifiers in the final stanza.
“An Arundel Tomb” is about truth and untruth, about seeing things clearly as opposed to seeing things through the lens of our own instinctual views about love. Hence, the poem explicitly raises the question of whether it is “true” – that is, a reliable description of a real artifact. As it happens, Larkin has many of the details wrong. Crucial to the poem is the distinction between “reading” and looking – that is, between the sarcophagus’ original function as naming its occupants. He mentions an inscription of a Latinized version of the names of the medieval Knight and his Lady – there is no such inscription on the actual tomb located in the Chichester Cathedral. (Commentators suggest that Larkin misremembered a typed label naming the occupants of the tomb for words chiseled into the stone.) The poet himself observed that he records the details as to the hand-holding incorrectly – he has transposed left for right. In interviews, Larkin said that the gesture of the held hand was unknown in other tombs from the era. This is also a mistake. Antiquarians observe that the gesture was commonly carved on these sorts of graves.
But my thought experiment is more radical than analysis of these relatively minor mistakes in Larkin’s description of the tomb. What would be the status of this verse if there were no Arundell tomb at all? What if Larkin had invented the artifact, as it were, from the whole cloth – that is, made up the church, the tomb, the visitors to the tomb, and sculpted gesture? How would we then imagine the poem? What would its meanings be?
The question is largely unanswerable, but I will venture several responses. First, this inquiry as to the fidelity of the verse to something actually existing in the world is more pointed today than when the poem was published in 1964. In that year, someone wanting to check on the accuracy of the poem would have to travel to first learn that the original of the artifact is at Chichester Cathedral and, then, travel to that place to see the object with his or her own eyes. In the alternative, a person interested in the truth, as it were, behind the poem would have to access a library large enough to contain volumes depicting tombs carved in the era of the Arundel lord and lady. It would probably take an hour or so of research to locate a photograph of the sarcophagus. The Internet, of course, makes this labor wholly superfluous. I was able to see pictures of the tomb as it really exists after research of about a minute. Furthermore, those pictures were accompanied with detailed commentary as to Larkin’s actual observations as to the tomb and the mistakes he made in describing the artifact in his famous poem. Less than five minutes easy work at a computer screen with an internet connection suffices for work that might otherwise have required Larkin’s readers to take a trip to Chichester or, at the very least, to a good library – probably work requiring an investment of a half-day. The poem documents how the meaning of the artifact changes with the “endless altered people” who see it. Truth to Larkin was static, armorial, something emblazoned on a heraldic shield – we see truth in an entirely different light. We can verify and confirm far faster than we can understand the meaning of a proposition. The alacrity of confirmation reverses the situation as it existed for Larkin: he expected us to understand the meaning(s) of his proposition long before we might undertake to confirm their veracity.
But what if there were no tomb at all? What if the artifact were entirely imaginary. First, we would regard an untruth of this kind as a kind of betrayal. The agreement between reader and poet is that Larkin is describing something that actually exists and, then, imputing meaning to it. Why this should be the contract between reader and poet is as unclear to me as it is inarguable. It is, more or less, impossible to conceive of the poem as without warrant in some kind of tangible reality. I think this is because we habitually conceive of poetry as affording us access to truth of some kind and find it difficult to imagine that a poet would lie to us.
Imagine that Larkin described a landscape that is palpably impossible: for instance, imagine a poem about the blue tongue of a glacier protruding into a tropical rainforest – that is icy ramparts towering over trees full of spider monkeys and brightly colored toucans. If we trust Larkin and like his poetry, we would not regard the imagery in the poem as an assembly of lies. Rather, we would convince ourselves that the landscape is a metaphor or instance of pathetic fallacy about the emotional state of the poet. In that way, I think, we would preserve for ourselves the notion that the poem, although decked out with impossible imagery, is, nonetheless, rooted in the truth.
