An Arundel Tomb Study Guide

Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair of medieval tomb effigies holding hands in a cathedral. Larkin himself was inspired to write it after visiting Chichester Cathedral with his then-partner, Monica Jones, in early 1956 and seeing a stone effigy like the one described in the poem. “An Arundel Tomb” consists of seven stanzas of six lines each with the rhyme scheme abbcac. The poem generally follows iambic tetrameter. Its final line, “What will survive of us is love,” is one of Larkin’s most famous, and is often taken out of context. Larkin himself wrote in his notebook that “love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years.”