Friendships developed between some contributors as well, it has to be said, some divisions but I hope that what will survive of us will not be acrimony. And some of the most crucial issues still come back to me from time to time, like this week, the debate on An Aurndel Tomb.
Some said that Larkin sincerely meant that 'what will survive of us is love' and that he had said outside of the poem that he believed that to be true. Having been brought up to concentrate on the text rather than any extraneous material, I couldn't entertain such a notion, and still can't. Of course, that is the last line of the poem but we need to read the whole poem rather than just quote the last line, with special reference to the last stanza.Time has 'transfigured' the effigies on the tomb in Chichester Cathedral, '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.
It is by all means a memorable line but being memorable doesn't in itself establish anything as fact. It is only an 'almost-instinct' that Larkin says we have and it has only been proven 'almost' true and something he perceives as 'hardly meant'. We shouldn't fall for the trick that time has played on us by the 'transfiguration' into untruth.
The attractive sentiment that we would perhaps like to believe in has been qualified and undercut comprehensively by the phrases Larkin has inserted before it so that the poem looks as if it ends on this triumphant, quite emphatic note when actually, it is an apparition. It is magnificent but we have been carefully prepared not to accept it. It is a brilliant trick, so many-layered that I'm already re-reading it over and again, even now, to see if there aren't enough negatives to say that even the qualifications have been qualified. But that would be the point, too, if it is too ambivalent to be sure of its 'meaning' at all and in the best poetry, perhaps, we appreciate something more than only meaning. I described another Larkin poem elsewhere as 'tight-rope walking' and here is more of him doing a similar thing.
It is no more admissable for me to say that surely the Larkin that wrote such poems as Mr. Bleaney and Church Going would not have endorsed such a religiose idea than it is for others to say that he said elsewhere that he did believe it. If we are going to bring in evidence from outside of the poem then we are no longer really discussing the poem.
But I wondered if we might recast the argument of the final stanza, without bringing in new material, in the opposite direction and see if it sheds any light. It is no longer poetry and does not end on such a grand chord but we might find the sense of it without Larkin's artistry and disorienting effect.
What will survive of us is love,
Although that isn't completely true.
It is something like an instinct we have.
It is suggested by the effigies on this tomb
But it wasn't what they originally meant.
It's just that over hundreds of years,
it has come to look like that to us.
It would have been an underwhelming poem had he written it thus, but many would and do but that is why those poets aren't read, remembered and discussed while Larkin is. It is still a fine idea, it is just not exceptional poetry. The fact that it is more obvious what that re-write is saying is a small advantage that it has. The fact that it wouldn't have become such a memorable poem is, however, a much greater disadvantage.
But I'd still be interested to hear from anyone who sees it a different way. If we ever got to the bottom of such questions, though, poetry might not be worth pursuing any more and that would be awful.
