"An Arundel Tomb" is a poem by Philip Larkin, written and published in 1956, and subsequently included in his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings . It describes the poet's response to seeing a pair of recumbent medieval tomb effigies with their hands joined in Chichester Cathedral. It is described by James Booth as "one of [Larkin's] greatest poems". [1] It comprises 7 verses of 6 lines each, each with rhyme scheme ABBCAC.
The tomb monument in Chichester Cathedral is now widely, though not quite certainly, identified as that of Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel (d. 1376) and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster (d. 1372). [2] [3] [4] [5] The couple were buried in the chapter house of Lewes Priory, and their monument may have been fashioned by the master mason Henry Yevele: documentary evidence survives relating to the shipping of two "marble" tombs for them in January 1375 from Poole Harbour to London at Yevele's behest. [6] [7] [4] Having first been erected at Lewes Priory, the effigies were probably moved to Chichester following the priory's dissolution in 1537. The earliest certain record of their presence in the cathedral dates from 1635. [2] [3] [8]
The male figure wears armour, and bears a lion rampant (the arms of the FitzAlan family) on his coat armour, and a lion's head couped as a crest on the helm beneath his head. [5] The female figure wears a veil, wimple, a long gown and a mantle, all characteristic dress of the 14th century; while beneath her gown, her legs are crossed. In a feature common to many English tombs of this period, the knight has a lion at his feet, while the lady has a dog: the lion may indicate valour and nobility, the dog loyalty. He has his right hand ungloved, and her right hand rests on his.
By the 19th century, the Arundel effigies had become badly mutilated, and also separated from one another, being placed against the north wall of the northern outer aisle of the Cathedral, with the woman at the feet of the man. [3] In 1843 Edward Richardson (1812–1869) was commissioned to restore them. [2] [3] It was Richardson who was responsible not only for reuniting them side by side, but also for carving the present joined hands, the originals having been lost. His research was conscientious, and the evidence would suggest that his restoration was reasonably faithful to the original pose. [2] [3] [4] Nevertheless, it was Richardson who was responsible for the precise form of the hands (the lady's right hand resting lightly on the knight's). [2] An additional detail that may have been Richardson's own choice was to depict the knight's empty right-hand gauntlet held in his left hand: he may have found precedents in several hand-joining monuments elsewhere, such as that of c. 1419–20 to Ralph Greene and his wife Katherine Clifton at St Peter's church, Lowick, Northamptonshire. [9] [10]
The monument is not inscribed, and it is likely that Larkin's reference to "the Latin names around the base" was inspired by a card label placed by the cathedral authorities – which probably, in accordance with the thinking of the time, misidentified the couple as Richard FitzAlan, 11th Earl of Arundel (d. 1397) and his countess. [2]
The hand-joining pose is unusual, but by no means unparalleled in England in this period. [11] Three near-contemporary examples were the alabaster effigies of Thomas de Beauchamp, 11th Earl of Warwick (d. 1369) and Katherine Mortimer (d. 1369) in St Mary's Church, Warwick (which survives); the alabaster effigies of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) and Blanche of Lancaster (d. 1368) in St Paul's Cathedral, London (now lost); and the brass to Sir Miles de Stapleton (d. 1364) and Joan de Ingham at Ingham, Norfolk (also lost). [12] [13] There were close connections between these patrons – Eleanor and Blanche of Lancaster, for example, were aunt and niece – and it is likely that all were fully aware of one another's burial choices. [12] It is also possible that all four monuments were the products of Yevele's workshop: Gaunt's monument was certainly Yevele's work, the Arundel monument probably was, and the Stapleton brass was in a style closely associated with him. [12]
Slightly later examples of the pose, which may have been inspired by the Arundel monument, include two commemorating two of the Earl and Countess's grandchildren: a brass to Sir William Arundel (d. 1400) and his wife Agnes (d. c. 1401) in Rochester Cathedral; and an effigial monument to Elizabeth Fitzalan (d. 1425) and Sir Robert Goushill (d. 1403) at Hoveringham, Nottinghamshire. [12]
Although many modern observers have – like Larkin – read the linking of hands as a sign of romantic love and affection, it seems more likely that the gesture's primary meaning was to signify the formal, legal, and sacramental bonds of matrimony. [12] [14]
Larkin visited Chichester Cathedral with his lover Monica Jones in January 1956. [1] [15] [16] He later claimed to have been "very moved" by the monument; [17] while in an audio recording of the poem, he stated that the effigies were unlike any he had ever seen before, and that he had found them "extremely affecting". [18] The poem was completed on 20 February. [1] [19] It was first published in the May 1956 issue of the London Magazine . [20]
Larkin draws inspiration from the figures to muse on time, mortality, fidelity and the nature of earthly love. In a letter to Monica written while the poem was still in progress, he identified his "chief idea" as that of the two effigies "lasting so long, & in the end being remarkable only for something they hadn't perhaps meant very seriously". [21] Andrew Motion describes him "using the detail of the hands as the focus for one of his most moving evocations of the struggle between time and human tenderness". [19]
The poem begins:
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. [22]— lines 1–6
and concludes:
[...] 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. [22]— lines 38–42
The final line is among the most quoted of all of Larkin's work. When read out of context, it may be understood as a "sentimental" endorsement of "love enduring beyond the grave". However, the poem as a whole is rather more nuanced, and challenges a simple romantic interpretation, even if in the end it is conceded to have "an inevitable ring of truth – if only because we want so much to hear it". [23] James Booth describes it as possessing a "mix of stark pessimism and yearning despair". [20]
Larkin himself wrote at the end of the manuscript draft of the poem:
Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years. [19] [20]
But he later commented in an interview:
I think what survives of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of responding to life, making it happier, even if it's only making a joke. [17]
Larkin wrote in a letter to Monica Jones, shortly after the poem's first publication, that he found it "embarrassingly bad!", because it was trying to be too clever. [20] In another letter to Robert Conquest he described it as "a bit timey" (i.e. with too much emphasis on time). [24] He later reiterated that he never really liked it, partly because it was unduly romantic, and partly for other reasons:
technically it's a bit muddy in the middle – the fourth and fifth stanzas seem trudging somehow, with awful rhymes like voyage/damage. Everything went wrong with that poem: I got the hands wrong – it's right-hand gauntlet really – and anyway the hands were a nineteenth-century addition, not pre-Baroque at all. [17] [25]
He was disappointed to learn that the hand-joining gesture was not as unusual as he had thought: "A schoolmaster sent me a number of illustrations of other tombs having the same feature, so clearly it is in no way unique." [26]
The poem was one of three read at Larkin's memorial service in Westminster Abbey in February 1986. [27] Its two final lines ("Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.") are also inscribed on the memorial stone to Larkin unveiled in December 2016 in Poets' Corner in the Abbey. [28]
The line "What will survive of us is love" is also inscribed on the gravestone of Maeve Brennan (d. 2003) in Cottingham Cemetery. Brennan was one of Larkin's lovers and her grave is situated a few metres away from Larkin's in the same cemetery. [29] [30]
Other poems appear to have taken inspiration, directly or indirectly, from the same Arundel tomb monument.
Thanks, Richardson! whose renovating hand,
Guided by talent, skill, and taste refined,
Hath given to the eye of cultured mind
This relic of a by-gone age to stand
In all its pristine beauty [...] [35]— lines 1–5
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
Chichester Cathedral, formally known as the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, is the seat of the Anglican Bishop of Chichester. It is located in Chichester, in West Sussex, England. It was founded as a cathedral in 1075, when the seat of the bishop was moved from Selsey.
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819. The title was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans Mercy.
Eleanor of Lancaster, Countess of Arundel was the fifth daughter of Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster and Maud Chaworth.
Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name, including homoerotic stories that parody the style of popular writers of contemporary girls' school fiction.
Anthony Simon Thwaite was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters.
Henry Yevele (c. 1320 – 1400) was the most prolific and successful master mason active in late medieval England. The first document relating to him is dated 3 December 1353, when he purchased the freedom of London. In February 1356 he was sufficiently well known as a mason that he was chosen as one of a commission of six cutting masons who were to inform the mayor and aldermen about the acts and articles of the craft.
Blanche of Lancaster was a member of the English royal House of Plantagenet and the daughter of the kingdom's wealthiest and most powerful peer, Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster. She was the first wife of John of Gaunt, the mother of King Henry IV, and the grandmother of King Henry V of England.
The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of 32 poems by Philip Larkin. It was first published by Faber in the United Kingdom on 28 February 1964. It was a commercial success, by the standards of poetry publication, with the first 4,000 copies being sold within two months. A United States edition appeared some seven months later.
Patrick Ewart Garland was a British director, writer and actor.
Jill is a novel by English writer Philip Larkin, first published in 1946 by The Fortune Press, and reprinted by Faber and Faber (London) in 1964. It was written between 1943 and 1944, when Larkin was twenty-one years old and an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford.
A church monument is an architectural or sculptural memorial to a deceased person or persons, located within a Christian church. It can take various forms ranging from a simple commemorative plaque or mural tablet affixed to a wall, to a large and elaborate structure, on the ground or as a mural monument, which may include an effigy of the deceased person and other figures of familial, heraldic or symbolic nature. It is usually placed immediately above or close to the actual burial vault or grave, although very occasionally the tomb is constructed within it. Sometimes the monument is a cenotaph, commemorating a person buried at another location.
John RickingaleD.D. also known as John de Rickingale was a medieval Bishop of Chichester, Master of Gonville Hall, Cambridge, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and Chancellor of York Minster.
"The Whitsun Weddings" is one of the best known poems by British poet Philip Larkin. It was written and rewritten and finally published in the 1964 collection of poems, also called The Whitsun Weddings. It is one of three poems that Larkin wrote about train journeys.
Collected Poems is the title of a posthumous collection of Philip Larkin's poetry edited by Anthony Thwaite and published by Faber and Faber. He released two notably different editions in 1988 and 2003, the first of which also includes previously unpublished work. Both editions include the contents of Larkin's collections The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, plus other material.
Larkin at Sixty (1982) is a collection of original essays and poems published to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the English poet Philip Larkin. It was edited and introduced by Anthony Thwaite and published by Larkin's publishers, Faber and Faber. A poetic dramatisation of the launch of the book was written by Russell Davies.
A tomb effigy is a sculpted effigy of a deceased person usually shown lying recumbent on a rectangular slab. Although these funeary and commemorative reliefs were first developed in Ancient Egyptian and Etruscan cultures, they appear most numerously in Western Europe tombs from the later 11th century, in a style that continued in use through the Renaissance and early modern period, and are still sometimes used. They typically represent the deceased in a state of "eternal repose", with hands folded in prayer, lying on a pillow, awaiting resurrection with a dog or lion at their feet. A husband and wife may be depicted lying side by side.
Pleurants or weepers are anonymous sculpted figures representing mourners, used to decorate elaborate tomb monuments, mostly in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. Typically they are relatively small, and a group were placed around the sides of a raised tomb monument, perhaps interspersed with armorial decoration, or carrying shields with this. They may be in relief or free-standing. In English usage the term "weepers" is sometimes extended to cover the small figures of the deceased's children often seen kneeling underneath the tomb effigy in Tudor tomb monuments.
The Tomb of John De Pitchford is a 13th-century carved effigy and tomb chest of John De Pitchford, located at St Michael and All Angels’ Church, Pitchford, Shropshire, England.