Re-posting An Arundel Tomb, one of my favorite poems... I just discovered photographs online of the actual  carved-stone medieval tomb described in the poem by Philip Larkin (it's in Chichester Cathedral in England). Now one has an additional point of reference, when reading Larkin's greatest poem about love... No other poem I know has registered its lines so firmly in my head. Of the keen observations Larkin has packed into this poem, the stand-out one is the words about "How soon succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read," capturing in an instant the drift of people away from knowing Latin and being able to read it, and how the lordly ceremony and officiousness of that language has all but died with it. 

An Arundel Tomb

By 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 plainness 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 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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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

The 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 an attitude remains:

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.