Listening Cherry 17 – What will survive of us is love

Image from here

One of Philip Larkin’s most famous poems is ‘An Arundel Tomb’. It is a poem about the tomb in Chichester Cathedral which you can see in the image.  The key thing to notice is that the two figures have their hands joined. Here is the last stanza.

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.

Sir Christopher Ricks, the famous literary critic, writes about the intonation of last line of this poem:

… Larkin’s last line has at least two different possibilities of intonation. If you lay more weight on ‘survive’, you hear a classical asseveration – ‘What will survive of us is love’. Classical because what is meant by the less stressed ‘us’, taken in passing, is humanity at large, the largest community of all men and women; classical because of the transcending of individuality within commonality.

For the purposes of our discussion, I imagine him to be discussing an reading which we can render as

|| WHAT will surVIVE of us || is LOVE ||

Ricks does not mention stresses (prominences) on ‘what’ or ‘love’, his focus is on the non-prominent ‘us’ which for him has ‘classical asseveration/humanity at large/transcending of individuality within commonality’ meaning.
Here is one of Larkin’s recordings of the last line, which matches (more or less) Ricks’s imagined reading.

|| WHAT will surVIVE of us || is LOVE ||

Can you hear the ‘classical asseveration/humanity at large/transcending of individuality within commonality’ in the non-prominent ‘us’?

Ricks imagines another reading with prominent/tonic ‘us’.

This would be the weight of romantic apprehension; ‘us’ not of the unstressed and properly undifferentiated mankind but as a particular ‘us’, here and now, moved not just personally but individually, particular visitors to a tomb or particular contemplators of one such visitor. (Ricks, 1984, p. 276)

For the purposes of our discussion, I imagine him to be discussing an reading which we can render as

|| WHAT will survive of US || is LOVE ||

Again, Ricks does not mention stresses (prominences) on ‘what’ or ‘love’, his focus is on the prominent ‘us’ which for him has ‘romantic apprehension/particular ‘us’/moved individually’ meaning.
Here is another of Larkin’s recordings of the last line, which matches (more or less) Ricks’s imagined reading.

|| WHAT will survive of US || is LOVE ||

What is interesting for me is the weight of meaning that Ricks places on the presence or absence of stress on ‘us’. It is a brilliant piece of practical criticism of the type: ‘I respond to literature, with rare words and beautiful sentences of my own’. Having done an English Literature degree (albeit having no idea what I was doing) I marvel at the skilled deployment of rare words, and the rhythm of sentence constructions. But jeepers, he is placing a lot of significance – way more than I would ever dare (or hope, or have the ability) to do on a relatively simple intonational difference.

Fortunately (or not) we have recorded evidence from Larkin himself. He recorded the poem three times (at least) and on two occasions he made ‘us’ prominent and tonic, and on one occasion it is non prominent. And after admiring the baroque prose and flights of fancy of Ricks’s interpretation, I find the recordings somewhat deflating.

Listening to them. I find it difficult to justify attributing quite so much (or indeed any) difference in meaning to the presence or absence of prominence on ‘us’. Part of me thinks that in the context of the poem (the world of the persona as observer contemplating and thinking aloud to himself the significance of the tomb) it seems to make little difference in meaning. Particularly because this five-word speech unit is but one component of what Larkin refers to as a ‘big finish’ – which concludes with the two words ‘is love’.

But of course there is another context to consider – that of a poem being read aloud where Larkin as reader is addressing an actual or imagined audience. Non-prominent ‘us’ could be viewed as signifying a large group ‘people in general’ whereas prominent ‘us’ would mean the smaller group of  ‘you and me and the other listeners to this reading/recording’. I could go further with this analysis, but Ricks (above) has done it much better than I could ever do.

But fundamentally, I believe that these different intonational renderings are simply different ways that mean the same thing. We can attribute meanings to these (prominent/non-prominent) formal differences through a process of inspection and imaginative play – but my view is that such meanings are unwarranted interpretational impositions. And it is something we also do in ELT: I believe we impose unwarranted layers of interpretation when we inspect a piece of written language – masquerading as speech – and set our imaginary forces to work to explain the meanings of intonational differences. But most often, in everyday speech, contextual conditions are such that formal differences carry no differences in meaning.

Ricks, C. (1984). The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.