The Mower

(Long Limb by Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American
artist)

THE MOWER

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

~ Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet, novelist, and jazz critic

An Arundel Tomb

(The Tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel)

The tomb pictured above and referred to in the poem below is now located in Chichester Cathedral.

A sign stands beside the tomb, giving the history of the stone effigies:

“The figures represent Richard Fitzalan III, 13th Earl of Arundel (ca. 1307-1376) and his second wife Eleanor of Lancaster [1318-1372], who by his will of 1375 were to be buried together ‘without pomp’ in the chapter house of Lewes Priory.

“The armour and dress suggest a date near 1375; the knight’s attitude is typical of that time but the lady’s crossed legs, giving the effect of a turn towards her husband, are rare. The joined hands have been thought due to ‘restoration’ by Edward Richardson (1812-69), but recent research has shown this feature to be original. If so, this monument must be one of the earliest showing this concession to affection where the husband was a knight rather than a civilian.”

Philip Larkin wrote the poem after he first saw the tomb, with “the stone effigies of the Earl and Countess of the Arundel family shown lying hand in hand in a way that I had never seen in English church ornamental sculpture anywhere else and which I found extremely affecting.” The poem was published in 1964 as part of his collection The Whitsun Weddings.

AN ARUNDEL TOMB

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits¹ vaguely shown
As jointed armor, 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 gauntlet², 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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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
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 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
Above their scrap of history,
Only their attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruths. 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.

~ Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet, novelist, and jazz critic

¹ habits – clothes
² his left-hand gauntlet – “I got the hands wrong,” Larkin said in a 1981 interview. “It’s a right-hand gauntlet really.”

Mother, Summer, I

(Mama by William Kurelek, 1927-1977, Canadian artist
and writer)

After considering a few more poems about storge, the affection within a family, we will spend the rest of July examining philia, or friendship.

Today’s poem is by a poet who usually stands at a distance from his subject. In this case, however, Philip Larkin writes with some tenderness as he thinks of the differences between his mother and him.

“Maternity is a sublime calling, and even though man’s ungrateful heart often forgets his mother’s sufferings to bring him into the world and her endless devotion in order to bring him up, it is well-known that when a man faces death on the battlefield, his last words are often directed to his mother. Dying soldiers scream, ‘Mother.’”

~ Alice von Hildebrand, writer and philosopher, born 1923 in Belgium, from The Privilege of Being a Woman

MOTHER, SUMMER, I

My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost.

And I her son, though summer-born
And summer-loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone;
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear.
An autumn more appropriate.

~ Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet, novelist, and jazz critic