The Full Text of “An Arundel Tomb”
The Full Text of “An Arundel Tomb”
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“An Arundel Tomb” Introduction
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"An Arundel Tomb" was written in 1956 by the British poet Philip Larkin. It was included as the final poem in his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings, and is also one of his best-known works. In the poem, the speaker is looking at stone effigies of a medieval earl and countess. Surprised to see that they are depicted holding hands, the speaker sets off a complex meditation about the nature of time, mortality, and love. The tomb of the title refers to a real monument found in the Chichester Cathedral, which Larkin visited with his longtime lover Monica Jones before writing the poem. The poem is also an example of ekphrasis—writing that describes a work of art.
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“An Arundel Tomb” Summary
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The effigies of the earl and countess lie next to each other, their stone faces faded with time. Their medieval clothes have been rendered in stone as well: the man wears armor, while the woman is depicted as dressed in stiff cloth. The two small stone dogs at the couple's feet make the scene feel a little less serious.
The tomb is plain-looking, which makes sense given that it was sculpted before the 1600s before the Baroque period of art and architecture. There really isn't much to note about the tomb until you see that the earl is holding his empty left-hand glove in his right hand. And then you see, in a striking yet lovely moment of surprise, that the earl's free hand is holding that of his wife.
The earl and countess would never have imagined lying like that for such a long time. Including a detail like hand-holding in the effigy was probably just something to impress the couple's friends, something the tomb's sculptor added without too much thought, while fulfilling the broader brief to help the earl and countess's names live on (these names are inscribed in Latin on the tomb).
The couple could never have guessed how soon after being sculpted—that is, set to lie in one place, going nowhere except forward through time—the air would start to subtly damage the tomb, and how soon people would stop visiting the effigies. Indeed, it would not be long before visitors would only glance at the effigies instead of actually taking the time to thoughtfully read the inscription on the tomb.
Even so, the couple remained stiffened in stone for a very, very long time. Snow fell through the years and, each summer, light shone through the windows. Many birds sang sweetly from the graveyard surrounding the tomb. And over the centuries, an endless stream of visitors walked past the tomb, as society and the people in it changed beyond recognition. These people eroded the earl and countess's identity like waves on a shoreline.
The earl and countess are powerless now, in an age so far removed from the time of knights and armor in which they actually lived. Smoke coils above their tomb, which is the couple's tiny piece of history. All that's left of the earl and countess is an idea about life.
Time has changed the earl and countess, transforming them into something untrue—or not quite true. The sense of loyalty suggested by their stone effigies, an idea they never really intended in the first place, has become their final symbol for the world, and it nearly proves something that almost feels instinctual to people: that love continues even after we die.
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“An Arundel Tomb” Themes
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Time and Impermanence
Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” is a complex poem that—as the title suggests—uses observations of a tomb as its starting point. This tomb belongs to an earl and countess from the 14th century. The poem takes a close and unflinching look at the tension between what the tomb was intended to represent at the time of construction—the earl and countess’s importance and status—and the reality of how it has been perceived throughout the hundreds of years that followed.
On the one hand, the tomb is an image of permanence: cast in stone, something of the earl and countess has, in a very literal way, survived the passage of time. But other than the stone itself, little else has stayed the same; the poem suggests that the intended significance of the tomb has been lost. The poem thus presents time—and the way it facilitates change—as a relentless force that overrides people’s intentions (and, perhaps, even erodes meaning itself).
The poem is told from the perspective of a 20th century observer who lives in an “unarmorial age” (as opposed to the age of knights and maidens in which the earl and countess existed). The speaker engages in a kind of conversation that can only go in one direction (given that the statues themselves can’t respond), and meditates on the way that time has altered the tomb’s meaning.
The sense of time’s awe-inspiring power is built up from the very beginning of the poem. The earl and countess’s faces are “blurred,” suggesting literally that the stone has worn down over the centuries, but also implying something of the couple’s unknowability. And though being cast in stone has made the earl and countess, in their strange way, survive the ages, it has also preserved them as images that have become increasingly distant and less relatable as time has marched on. The speaker makes the point that the couple could have had no idea how time would alter them: “They would not guess how early in … The air would change to soundless damage.” Such are the power and relentlessness of time that even “air” becomes a destructive force, eroding the stone and, as mentioned above, making the faces (and identities) of the earl and countess more remote.
And before long, imagines the speaker, the way that people engaged with the tomb changed too. Whereas in its early existence people might have visited to mourn for the earl and countess, soon enough the tomb’s inscription just became something that people would “look” at rather than “read.” That is, the tomb began to lose its intended meaning as a place for people to pay their respects to two specific individuals, and instead become a more detached object, a kind of historical curiosity.
Imagining the world around the tomb over the ages, the speaker notes how “endless altered people” would have come to look at it (but not necessarily know anything about it). This phrase reveals that though the tomb has in some ways stayed the same, the world around it is in a constant state of change—and, the poem argues, this ultimately changes the tomb too, because people no longer see it in the same way. So, despite the tomb’s intended function as a kind of permanent memorial, any permanence it has due to its merely being a stone object; its original meaning or significance has proven fleeting.
Indeed, such is the power of time that the earl and countess have had their identities “wash[ed]” away—and, for people of such high status, identity was a very important part of life! In fact, it’s the whole reason the tomb was made in the first place: to signal the couple’s societal importance. This importance, of course, could not endure, turning the tomb from an object based on identity to one that seems to speak to a more profound truth: that change is the one true constant of the world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-4
- Lines 7-10
- Line 13
- Lines 16-18
- Lines 19-31
- Lines 32-36
- Line 38
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Everlasting Love
“An Arundel Tomb” meditates on the stone effigies of an earl and countess, provoking a rich and complex discussion about love. Larkin was a notoriously unsentimental poet, but the way that love is presented in the poem can’t be reduced to an overly simplified statement like “love is an illusion.” The poem balances a skepticism about love with a kind of grudging understanding about love’s importance to human beings. The poem’s final line—“what will survive of us is love”—is made uncertain by what comes before: that this is an “almost-instinct” that is only “almost true.” This perhaps best sums up the poem’s overall attitude to love: that love is not quite the all-powerful life force that some poets might paint it as, but it’s not entirely meaningless either.
Whatever the speaker’s attitude towards love, it’s clear that love is front and center of the poem. Indeed, that’s because the object on which the poem bases its discussion—an earl and countess lying down holding hands—is a deliberate image of love. But the speaker doesn’t accept this love at face value, instead probing at it and asking questions.
With the above in mind, the speaker is actually initially surprised to see what feels like a strikingly contemporary symbol of love on the tomb. Normally, “pre-baroque” tombs are “plain,” but the speaker notices something that gives them a “sharp, tender shock”: the earl and countess are depicted holding hands. This, of course, is something people still do six or so centuries later. In this small but important observation, love does seem to be a kind of powerful force, common ground between people in two very different historical periods.
But the speaker also casts doubt on whether the earl and countess would really want to be interpreted as a symbol of some overblown notion of love’s everlasting power. “They would not think to lie so long,” says the speaker, playing on the horizontal depiction of the couple and, more importantly, the idea that there is something not quite true about viewing the tomb as a comment on love. That is, “lie” speaks to dishonesty as much as it does to the actual depiction of the couple.
Yet it’s hard to shake the impression that the speaker is somehow moved by the tomb. The hand-holding itself is a kind of “shock” because it seems to be incongruous with what the speaker assumes about the age in which the tomb was made—indeed, marriage for the earl and countess in their era could have been as much a business transaction as an expression of romantic love. But the hand-holding unsettles the speaker’s inherited ideas about those times. Perhaps, then, it makes sense to see the poem’s famous ending as exactly that—a kind of unsettling marriage of two incompatible ideas: firstly, a cynical idea of love as something of little value, perhaps just a means through which the human race multiples and spreads itself; and secondly, the complete opposite idea that love is an eternal, death-conquering force! That’s why the earl and countess are a kind of paradox, an example of “stone fidelity”—deadness and coldness on the one hand, and enduring togetherness on the other.
Accordingly, the poem’s final two lines seem to hold both ideas in tension: “Our almost- instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.” The speaker, perhaps, can understand why people want to believe in love’s power, but can’t quite fully support that belief. Neither, however, can the speaker dismiss it out of hand.
Worth noting here is that Larkin himself had somewhat conflicted opinions about love, but never held it in particularly high regard; at the bottom of a draft of this poem he once wrote, “Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years.” On the other hand, he later said of the poem, “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.” Ultimately, the ending speaks to the complexity of life and the world of human emotion, and works as a kind of challenge to people who wish to oversimplify such questions—or to avoid them altogether.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2
- Lines 5-6
- Lines 8-12
- Lines 13-15
- Line 16
- Lines 17-18
- Lines 24-26
- Line 36
- Lines 37-42
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “An Arundel Tomb”
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Lines 1-6
Side by side, ...
... under their feet.The poem opens with a plain description of the "Arundel Tomb" of the title. This tomb memorializes two medieval aristocrats—an "earl and countess"—whose likenesses have been carved in stone. These effigies lie next to each other, dressed in the typical clothing and armor of their time; they even have their two small dogs carved near their feet. This is a real tomb, which can be found in Chichester Cathedral in the south of England. (That said, there is some debate about whether this tomb is the same as the one in Larkin's poem.)
The sibilance in the first two lines imbues the poem's opening with a quiet, hushed quality—fitting for a description of a tomb:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,Lines 3 and 4 then reveal further detail about how the earl and countess are depicted on the tomb. "Habits" here refers to their clothing (which is part of the stone sculpture). The "jointed armour" is the earl's outfit, while the "stiffened pleat" belongs to the countess. Harking back to the medieval age, the armour signals the sheer distance in time from the moment the tomb was created and the time in which the poem was written (and, indeed, the time in which it is read). It's also worth noting how line 4, like line 1, is separated into two parts by a caesura, subtly strengthening the image of the earl and countess as a couple—a twosome—lying "side by side."
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
Lines 5 gives one more detail to the opening description of the tomb: the "little dogs under their feet." On the (probable) actual tomb, the creature at the bottom of the earl is a lion, more in keeping with the symbolism of the medieval era. But the "dogs" are a useful symbol here too, conveying modern-day suggestions of loyalty and faithfulness—which form a large poet of the poem's developing discussion.
The language is deliberately plain here, though, because the speaker doesn't really expect to feel a significant or profound reaction upon looking at the tomb at first. So far, the tomb seems pretty straightforward—like any other very old memorial to long-dead people. That said, even these opening lines hint at the poem's complex discussion of time in relation to the couple. On the one hand, they are a symbol of permanence, their memory long outliving the era in which they were born. Yet though stone is durable, it's ultimately subject to time's forces too. Indeed, the earl and countess's faces are "blurred" because the stone is slowly but surely being eroded. On a less literal level, this blurring suggests how the earl and countess's actual identities have been lost to time. And, indeed, the discussion later in the poem focuses on the way the world around the tomb has changed completely, the lovers no longer lying in the same context as when the tomb was first made.
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Lines 7-12
Such plainness of ...
... holding her hand. -
Lines 13-18
They would not ...
... around the base. -
Lines 19-24
They would not ...
... read. Rigidly they -
Lines 25-31
Persisted, linked, through ...
... at their identity. -
Lines 32-38
Now, helpless in ...
... Untruth. -
Lines 38-42
The stone fidelity ...
... us is love.
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“An Arundel Tomb” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"An Arundel Tomb" uses alliteration fairly regularly throughout its seven stanzas. Oftentimes, this takes the form of sibilance. The first example comes immediately in the poem:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The two /s/ sounds form a pair, and the pairing of sounds is used throughout the poem ("plainness" and "pre-baroque" in line 7, "his left-hand" in line 9, etc.). Of course, sound-pairs are a way that the poem can gently hint at the poem's main pair: the earl and countess, who have been paired together for a number of centuries by this point (in life, death, and stone). The /s/ sounds are themselves "side by side."
The next key example comes in stanza 2. In fact, there are two important uses of alliteration one after another:
... a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.The /sh/ sounds have a sort of tenderness and sharpness to them all at once, and, in being used for the first time in the poem, might come as a surprise on the reader's ear—mirroring the speaker's surprise at noticing the way in which the earl and countess are depicted holding hands. The /h/ sound—the first letter of "hand," of course—then dominates the following line, showing the permanence of the earl and countess's pose cast in stone. The /h/ grips the line, mimicking the action of holding hands.
Later, the alliteration of the /t/ sound in lines 37 to 38 underscores the thematic connection between the stone effigies, the passage of time, and truth itself:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelityThis connection is bolstered by the consonance of "into" and "fidelity." Altogether, the insistence on the /t/ sound here suggests the inevitability of "truth" or intention changing over time—even for objects made of stone.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “S,” “s”
- Line 7: “p,” “p”
- Line 9: “h,” “h”
- Line 11: “sh,” “sh”
- Line 12: “H,” “h,” “h,” “h,” “h”
- Line 13: “l,” “l”
- Line 16: “s,” “s”
- Line 17: “l”
- Line 18: “L”
- Line 20: “s,” “s”
- Line 22: “T,” “t”
- Line 23: “s,” “s”
- Line 24: “l”
- Line 25: “l,” “l”
- Line 26: “L”
- Line 27: “b”
- Line 28: “L,” “b,” “s,” “s”
- Line 29: “B,” “p”
- Line 30: “p”
- Line 32: “h,” “h”
- Line 34: “s,” “s,” “s,” “s,” “k”
- Line 35: “s,” “c”
- Line 37: “T,” “t”
- Line 38: “t,” “t”
- Line 41: “a,” “a”
- Line 42: “W,” “w”
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Consonance
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Paradox
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Oxymoron
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Diacope
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"An Arundel Tomb" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Earl
- Countess
- Habits
- Jointed Armour
- Stiffened Pleat
- Pre-baroque
- Gauntlet
- Effigy
- Latin Names
- Supine
- Tenantry
- Thronged
- Litter
- Strewed
- Bone-riddled
- Unarmorial Age
- Trough
- Skeins
- Transfigured
- Fidelity
- Blazon
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “earl”)
A rank of male aristocrat or nobleman in Britain.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “An Arundel Tomb”
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Form
"An Arundel Tomb" is a 42-line poem, made up of seven stanzas with six lines apiece (making each a sestet). The regularity of the form suggests a certain kind of deliberate craftsmanship, which seems in keeping with the craftsmanship that went into making the tomb itself.
That said, the speaker frequently allows phrases to extend across lines or even stretch across stanzas (enjambment), only to then come to rest in the middle of a line with a caesura. In other words, though the poem's form feels broadly regular, the speaker's actual language is itself more fluid and immediate, seemingly unconcerned with perfectly aligning with the poem's established form. The reader might feel like they're right there alongside the speaker, considering the tomb in real time.
The poem is also technically an example of ekphrasis—a piece of writing that contemplates a particular object. At first, the speaker doesn't seem to expect much of the tomb, anticipating only its "plainness." But it's the sight of the hand-holding that sets the poem off on its trajectory. The tomb, then, serves as a jumping off point for a deep and complex meditation on the nature of time and love.
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Meter
As with most Larkin poems, "An Arundel Tomb" follows a regular meter. Generally speaking, the poem is written in iambic tetrameter: four metrical feet in each line following an unstressed-stressed (da DUM) syllable pattern. Take lines 2 and 3, for example:
The earl | and coun- | tess lie | in stone,
Their prop- | er hab- | its vague- | ly shownMost lines follow the meter closely, creating a steady rhythm that reflects something of the craftsmanship involved in making the tomb in the first place—it isn't easy to make a metrical poem flow and read well!
Of course, there are a few variations to the meter throughout the poem. The first line, for instance, opens with a stressed syllable:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
This could be scanned in a couple different ways. We could say that the first foot here is "catalectic," for instance, which just means its first foot is missing a syllable (technically, this line would be called "headless iambic tetrameter"). More important, though, is noticing how the poem is introduced with forcefulness, via the stress on "side." Later, in line 6, the third foot is actually a trochee (stressed-unstressed, DUM da). This has a playful sound, gently conveying the "hint of the absurd" that the speaker detects in the figures of the dogs at the couple's feet:
The lit- | tle dogs | under | their feet.
Line 31 also breaks with the meter, as the speaker describes the way that an "endless" sea of people has "wash[ed]" away the earl and countess's identity. The phrase extends over a stanza break, and the trochaic first foot of line 31 makes the word "Washing" more active and dramatic:
The end- | less alt- | ered peo- | ple came,
Washing | at their | iden- | tity. -
Rhyme Scheme
Each six-line stanza of "An Arundel Tomb" has a regular rhyme scheme. This is:
ABBCAC
Many of the rhymes are perfect rhymes—stone/shown or pleat/feet in the first stanza, for instance. Others are more like slant rhymes (baroque/shock in the second stanza). Overall, though, the effect of this fairly elaborate scheme is to create a sense of craftsmanship and skill. The poet's technique, in other words, is a kind of analogy of the sculptor's work that made the stone effigies of the earl and countess. Over seven stanzas, it's no mean feat to achieve.
The other thing to notice about the rhyme scheme is the way in which it revolves around pairs. Each A, B, and C rhyme has a partner elsewhere in the stanza. As this is a poem very much about what it means to be in a couple, and about love more generally, the rhyme scheme is a neat and tidy way of representing this idea of pairing-off.
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“An Arundel Tomb” Speaker
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On its face, "An Arundel Tomb" doesn't seem to be about its speaker as much as it's about what that speaker is looking at (i.e., the tomb of the title). As such, the speaker remains pretty vague throughout. As with many of Larkin's poems, there is no use of the first-person pronoun at all. Instead, the discussion has the appearance of relative objectivity—though the "sharp tender shock" referred to in line 11 can only really relate to the speaker's own, personal experience. That said, the use of the "one" pronoun in the same line indicates that the speaker feels their reaction to be something fairly universal. This helps the poem feel more immediate to the reader, like they're right there with the speaker looking at the tomb.
But even though the speaker never uses "I," it's hard not to feel some sense of personality coming through. Essentially, the poem is the speaker's personal meditation on the thoughts and feelings that the effigies provoke. Most readings of the poem also tend to equate the speaker with Larkin himself. Indeed, the reticent attitude towards love and the rejection of easy sentiments is typical of Larkin's poetry more generally. Larkin also wrote the poem after visiting the tomb of the poem's title, meaning it's fair to assume the thoughts presented here are close to Larkin's own.
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“An Arundel Tomb” Setting
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Though the poem never says this explicitly, the tomb of its title is a reference to a real tomb located in a cathedral in Britain. As such, readers with some context can assume that this cathedral is the setting of the poem. Because the speaker points out how much time has passed since the tomb was constructed and that it now exists in an "unarmorial" age (that is, an age without things like knights and suits of armor), it's also safe to assume that the poem takes place in the present day.
That said, "An Arundel Tomb" is also an example of ekphrasis, which means it takes one particular object and uses it as the basis for its discussion. In that sense, then, the poem is essentially set in, on, and around the stone tomb itself—though filtered through the speaker's perceptions and words. At first, the tomb seems to be "plain" and a little uninspiring. But the speaker is shocked to see that the earl and countess are holding hands—which is the moment that really sets off the poem's general discussion of love and time. The setting is, then, also partly in the speaker's mind. Indeed, the speaker's imagination goes on a kind of voyage of its own, with the speaker casting their mind back to the time when the tomb was made, and how the hands came to be depicted in this way.
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Literary and Historical Context of “An Arundel Tomb”
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Literary Context
Philip Larkin is one of England's best-known 20th century poets. He was born in Coventry but famously lived half of his life in Hull, where he was the university's librarian. This particular poem comes from one of Larkin's most celebrated collections, The Whitsun Weddings. Indeed, it is the last poem in the collection and encapsulates two of the main themes that appear throughout: love and time (the title poem from that collection makes for useful comparison with this one). From that same book, "Talking in Bed" also seems particularly relevant. More broadly, Larkin's formative influences included poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas ("Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"), and W.B. Yeats—whose poem "The Wild Swans at Coole" also takes a thoughtful look at the passage of time.
Generally speaking, Larkin's poems are known for being witty, well-crafted, and uncompromising when it comes to the rejection of life's easy sentiments and clichés. Partly for these reasons, perhaps, Larkin's poetry has a reputation for being somewhat moody and dour. Particularly when considered out of context, poems like "This Be the Verse" can seem like wholesale rejections of what it means to be human. And at the bottom of one of his drafts for "An Arundel Tomb," Larkin wrote that "Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years." This perhaps supports the more cynical reading of the poem—that the speaker thinks love is nothing more than a false illusion. On the other hand, Larkin later made the following comment, which perhaps supports a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of love: "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."
Larkin is sometimes considered to be part of a loosely connected group of writers known as The Movement—a term coined by a magazine editor in 1954—which included poets Donald Davie and Thom Gunn. Generally speaking, the Movement is rooted in a certain idea of "Englishness" that is not easy to pin down. It is best expressed, perhaps, by Larkin's keenness to ground his poems in a kind of English reality, in terms of location, objects, names, and sentiment.
Historical Context
Philip Larkin was born in 1922 and died in 1985. For most of his life, then, Larkin lived under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Though old enough to fight in World War II, Larkin was excused from service because of bad eyesight. After the publication of The Whitsun Weddings—which was received well critically and sold in large numbers—Larkin was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Though the poem doesn't precisely specify the time in which it is set, there's enough evidence to presume that it's written from a contemporary vantage point—contemporary to the time of writing, that is. The speaker notes how the age that they live in—as opposed to that of the earl and countess—is "unarmorial." In other words, it's no longer a time of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress. Furthermore, it's known that Larkin wrote the poem after paying a visit to Chichester cathedral and seeing the real-life Arundel Tomb.
The actual tomb is most likely that of Richard FitzAlan (Earl of Arundel) and his wife Eleanor of Lancaster, who lived during the 14th century. In fact, this tomb is more of a memorial—because in reality it doesn't hold the couple's remains (these are buried in Lewes Priory). This is one of a number of discrepancies between the poem and the supposed actual tomb, but historical inaccuracy doesn't really have an effect on the reader's experience of the poem. Other differences are that the real tomb has no "Latin names around the base," and one of the "little dogs" is in fact a lion (a common medieval symbol).
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More “An Arundel Tomb” Resources
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External Resources
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Larkin's Letters — An article that reviews a publication of Larkin's correspondence with his mother.
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Larkin and Music — Larkin—a jazz aficionado—chooses his favorite pieces of music.
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A Reading by Larkin Himself — "An Arundel Tomb" read by its author.
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More Poems and Larkin's Biography — Further resources on Larkin from the Poetry Foundation.
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Larkin's Life and Work — A short radio documentary about Larkin produced by the BBC.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Philip Larkin
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