An Arundel Tomb

An Arundel Tomb Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

The exact identity of the speaker isn't clear, but he's contemplative and curious.

Form and Meter

Seven verses of six lines, iambic tetrameter

Metaphors and Similes

Metaphors:
"Washing at their identity" The people visiting the effigy don't literally wash away the couple's identity, but they help erode it by disregarding the couple's identities.
"Their final blazon" The couple's intertwined hands serve as a metaphorical blazon, or description of a coat of arms, providing the key to remembering them.

Alliteration and Assonance

Alliteration:
"supine stationary voyage," "soon succeeding eyes," "helpless in the hollow," "smoke in slow suspended skeins"

Irony

The couple's intertwined hands, perhaps just an afterthought by the sculptor, have come to represent eternal love even though the couple likely didn't marry for love.

Genre

Poetry

Setting

A chapel

Tone

Contemplative, serious, curious

Protagonist and Antagonist

Major Conflict

Whether or not love can survive past death.

Climax

"Time has transfigured them into/Untruth."

Foreshadowing

Understatement

Allusions

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification

"Light/Each summer thronged the glass," "A bright/Litter of birdcalls strewed"

Hyperbole

Onomatopoeia

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