An Arundel Tomb - Philip Larkin

 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 plainess 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 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 His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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 could see:
 A sculptor's sweet comissioned grace
 Thrown off in helping to prolong
 The Latin names around the base.

 They would not guess how early in
 Their supine stationary voyage
 Their 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 grass. 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
 Above their scrap of history,
 Only an attitude remains:

 Time has transfigured them into
 Untruth. The stone finality
 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.

- Philip Larkin