Stone Fidelity
I’ve got no real beef with Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate. Sometimes he writes things that make me scratch my head (people shouldn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses? Really?), but generally he’s one among a number of smart folks who like books but aren’t academics or interested in how academics read and like to set up academics as the straw men against whom his common sense makes sense. Mildly annoying, but pretty much par for the three-putt course that is what passes for book talk in the mainstream media these days. But if you’re going to be a smart guy who likes books, and if your thing is that you read closely and well, then you’ve got to read closely and well, and in this post about lines on love by Larkin and Auden, he doesn’t.
For those among you who have forgotten (shame on you), Larkin’s wonderful poem, “An Arundel Tomb,” published in the also wonderful 1964 volume, The Whitsun Weddings, it ends with the line “What will survive of us is love.” Rosenbaum makes a big deal of how this line is so unlike the rest of Larkin’s work, which tends toward the dark, the dour, the depressive and depressing (these terms are mine, not his, but for neither of us, I think, are they pejoratives). He also makes a big deal out of a footnote in the new Collected Poems, which shows how Larkin reconsidered and maybe even regretted the line. My sense, though, is that the main reason Larkin might have come to regret the line is that so many readers, including Rosenbaum for most of his post, read the line as if it’s not part of a complete sentence, and, in doing so, reverse the actual meaning of the clause.
While this line ends the poem, it also concludes a sentence. This sentence:
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.
That first bit of the sentence refers to the speaker’s speculation, earlier in the poem, about whether the sculptor invented the salient detail of the title’s tomb, the way the knight depicted in it has removed his gauntlet and holds the similarly ungloved hand of his wife in their effigy. The gesture of hand-holding is “hardly meant,” which is to say that it is probably not intended by the couple (and with “hard” picking up on stone, that the intention might have been the sculptor’s), but, in spite of that, it has come to be the emblem set upon the couple and their life (and death) together. An accident, almost, the artist’s fabrication at once misreads and leads to further misreading. It is in this way that it proves whatever it proves about this notion that love survives us. But what is it, exactly, that the “final blazon” proves about that notion?
I tell my students often that repetition is one key means by which poets economically achieve their meaning. In a medium where words weigh, a word used twice matters perhaps more than twice. The “almost” here, repeated twice in the poem’s penultimate line, matters exponentially. It first modifies “instinct,” which tells us that we don’t really have an instinct about love surviving us. We have an “almost-instinct,” which is by definition a not instinct. An inclination, maybe? A wishful thought? And the second “almost” modifies the truth of that not instinct so as to make it not true, but only “almost true.” In the context of the complete sentence, the poem’s closing line means not “What will survive of us is love,” but, instead, something like “isn’t it pretty to think so?”
And to see this, you need neither a course in poststructuralist linguistic theory nor the long footnote in the Collected Poems. You need only to read the whole sentence.
