Revised Critical 4-20-12

Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb shows what Auden is talking about when he says that “everything that we remember no matter how trivial…are equally the subject of poetry”. Larkin’s poem is talking about a visit to a tomb of a man and a woman. You wouldn’t normally think to write about something like this. But with what Auden is saying in Poetry as Memorable Speech poetry can be about anything “the mark on the wall, the joke at luncheon, word games…” When I read this from Auden, I thought it was really interesting. I had never thought about any subject to be considered a poem. This point opened my own eyes when thinking about what I could write about to make a poem. I thought this was a pretty usual point.

When reading Larkin’s poems, I am not quite sure what his tone is. Every poem he writes seems different. In An Arundel Tomb I think the tone is kind of gleeful-mournful. He talks about how the tomb looks and that the couple is holding hands, this to me is gleeful. Then it goes on to talk about how nobody knows who these people are they are just there to see the tomb and this couple holding hands. This part is more sad and mournful because when this couple died they never could have imagined that people would come to see their tomb and not even know who they were in life. 

Auden states that "Similes, metaphors of image or idea, and auditory metaphors such as rhyme, assonance, and alliteration help further to clarify and strengthen the pattern and internal relations of the experiences described." In An Arundel Tomb, Larkin’s rhyme scheme is very unique and it almost doesn’t sound as if the lines rhyme with each other but I think it’s this subtle way in which he does, clarifies and strengthens the poem.

If talking about Larkin’s poem and why I would consider it as memorable speech, I would have to say that it is original and that it puts recognizable emotions in a different way. In this poem I had a feeling of sorrow and sadness for this couple. They were only recognized by them holding hands, not for what they did in their time on earth. I did a little digging after reading this poem and found out that Larkin was writing about the tomb of 13^th Earl of Arundel and his wife. But over time no one identifies this and that seems to be what Larkin is conveying in this poem. He makes you almost feel sorry for this deceased couple.

In this poem of Larkin’s, there is a certain emotion talking about the eternal love of the couple that lay in the tomb. Auden says that “it must move our emotions”, which I believe this poem does. The couple was together in life and now will forever be together in afterlife. The first time I read the poem I took the last two lines of this poem “Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love” to mean that their love will be immortalized. When reading it over again I see that maybe Larkin is saying that this is what is left to define them and maybe that wasn’t what they had intended at all.