A Good Read: An Arundel Rhyme

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense….

So Alexander Pope said in 1711 in his “An Essay on Criticism,” and the principle that “the sound must seem an echo to the sense” holds true. One of poetry’s high values is mimesis, a representation or imitation of the real world in language. Pope provides us with several examples of this later in his essay: “…when loud surges lash the sounding shore, / the hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.” The density of use of the letters l and s recreates the sound of the water striking the shore, while the r and short vowel sounds of “hoarse,” “rough,” and “verse” mimic the roar of the river. The concept of mimesis extends beyond the representation of sounds as well. From mimesis comes the idea of visual poetry, in which the body of the poem and the shape of its lines mimic its subject. A poem about an apple, for instance, may have lines that, seen together, look like an apple. More subtly and more interestingly, mimesis can be found in small choices of phrase, line length, vowel length, and rhyme.

Philip Larkin, a twentieth-century British poet, wrote “An Arundel Tomb,” a poem of seven six-line stanzas, after visiting a medieval tomb in Chichester. While there is much more that can be said about the poem, its use of rhyme produces mimetic effects. Its rhyme scheme is abbcac, and, but for two apparent exceptions, it employs all full rhymes, matching “blurred” and “absurd,” for example, and “stone” and “shown.” While reading the poem, listen for when the sounds of rhymes are slant—when matched words don’t entirely rhyme but look as if they should.

An Arundel Tomb

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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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
About 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.

An American will hear two deviations from the pattern of full rhyme sounds: the second stanza’s slant rhyming of “pre-baroque” and “shock,” and the final stanza’s slant rhyming of “prove” and “love.” To American ears, both could be mimetic. “Shock” rhyming with “pre-baroque,” for instance, comes as something of, well, a shock, seeming to use its deliberate disruption of pattern to produce, at least in some part, the surprise that it describes. However, “baroque” may be pronounced “Barack” in British English, and the pair may count as a full rhyme.

The last line’s rhyme of “love” with “prove” is the only true exception to the pattern of full rhyme, and after so many perfect rhymes, the slant rhyme “love” is discordant, jarring, surprising. This very discord is thematically related to Larkin’s argument that the earl and countess have been turned into “untruth.” The final rhyme of “prove” and “love” is itself only “almost true,” reinforcing, also, the untruth of the statement “What will survive of us is love.” This sort of effect is perhaps only possible because of the strictly obeyed formal rhyme structure of the preceding stanzas. One of the virtues of structure and pattern in poetry is that breaks in pattern stand out. Larkin tends to favor that sort of patterning, and one of the delights in his work is to see how he uses the exceptions to his very formal patterns to produce new depths and complexities. In any event, it’s tiny details like these that make poetry so interesting and so effective, and when we can master the ideas behind them, we’ll be much more perceptive when we read poetry, and, ultimately, better at making our own poems.—Evan McWilliams