Side by side, their faces blurred, <br />The earl and countess lie in stone, <br />Their proper habits vaguely shown <br />As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, <br />And that faint hint of the absurd - <br />The little dogs under their feet. <br /> <br />Such plainness of the pre-baroque <br />Hardly involves the eye, until <br />It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still <br />Clasped empty in the other; and <br />One sees, with a sharp tender shock, <br />His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. <br /> <br />They would not think to lie so long. <br />Such faithfulness in effigy <br />Was just a detail friends would see: <br />A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace <br />Thrown off in helping to prolong <br />The Latin names around the base. <br /> <br />They would no guess how early in <br />Their supine stationary voyage <br />The air would change to soundless damage, <br />Turn the old tenantry away; <br />How soon succeeding eyes begin <br />To look, not read. Rigidly they <br /> <br />Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths <br />Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light <br />Each summer thronged the grass. A bright <br />Litter of birdcalls strewed the same <br />Bone-littered ground. And up the paths <br />The endless altered people came, <br /> <br />Washing at their identity. <br />Now, helpless in the hollow of <br />An unarmorial age, a trough <br />Of smoke in slow suspended skeins <br />Above their scrap of history, <br />Only an attitude remains: <br /> <br />Time has transfigures them into <br />Untruth. The stone fidelity <br />They hardly meant has come to be <br />Their final blazon, and to prove <br />Our almost-instinct almost true: <br />What will survive of us is love.<br /><br />Philip Larkin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-arundel-tomb/
