Diving Deeper: Nuance, But It's Still Lovely

I was grabbed by a headline in the NY Times today, "How to Be Old". Hey, I'm old, and I'd like to know how to be! So I read the piece. Very forgettable. Except for the very last line: "I’m fond of quoting the poet Philip Larkin: “What will survive of us is love.” That should do it." What a lovely thought! I was charmed, and intrigued.

As the NYTimes does, there was a link to the whole poem at the Poetry Foundation website, "An Arundel Tomb" by Philip Larkin. (The link is preserved in my cut-and-pasted quote above.) I have as an attribute the ability to fall deep down rabbit holes, to keep digging deeper on something that interests me. In fact, one set of feedback from a corporate assessment process described me this way: "When you read an interesting book, you will go look up additional references. More, you will collect many books on different aspects of the same subject, and you will actually read most of those."

Guilty as charged. When I am into something, I'm all the way in. I clicked through to the provided link, and read the whole poem. Then I read the commentary from the Poetry Foundation. Then I read more, and this short quote is not all there is to the poem, or the story.

Philip Larkin is no Mary Oliver; he was a cynic, an atheist, and "notoriously grumpy". My man! Dude! Where have you been all my life? I guess this is what I get for majoring in field trips rather than English. I mean, I'd heard the name, but had no idea what he was about.

Here, the poet is musing on how much we want to believe in love, even when it is not true or pure or simple. Here is the whole thing:

 

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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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 not 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 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   

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 think it is a better and truer choice to quote the last TWO lines:

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

It's the "almost" that makes it real and profound to me, not a saccharine myth, but the human reality. In their day, marriage among the aristocracy was not a matter of romance, but rather business. But we want this romantic image to be true. And by wanting it, it will become more true.

(And, I'm as touched by the little dogs as by their clasped hands.) 

I was able to get an ebook of a novel Larkin wrote, so I'm ready to continue to dive even deeper. Apparently I have to go analogue to get any of his poetry books. Maybe.