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His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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 no 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 grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered 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 transfigures 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.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Sonnet 58: That god forbid, that made me first your slave by William Shakespeare
- Twins by Vinko Kalinić
- The First Thrush by Mary Gilmore
- Battalion-Relief by Siegfried Sassoon
- They Tell Of The Warsaw Uprising by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Listening To Rwanda Genocide by Satish Verma
- The Dragon and The Unicorn by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Sonnet To Mrs. Reynolds’s Cat poem – John Keats poems
- Why Did I Laugh Tonight? No Voice Will Tell poem – John Keats poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: Is it, then, regret for buried time poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Mother’s Day, 1993 by Todd H. C. Fischer
- When I Go Alone At Night by Rabindranath Tagore
- Владимир Луговской – Курсантская венгерка
- O My Lord, Your Dwelling Places Are Lovely poem – Yehudah ha-Levi poems | Poetry Monster
- A Mesh by Shahida Latif
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.