Summary
The first stanza begins with the speaker viewing the effigies lying “side by side,” their faces “blurred” from years of wear. Their clothing is loosely represented, the earl wearing armor and the countess a stiff, pleated dress. The speaker also notices figures of dogs lying at the feet of the couple, which he finds somewhat “absurd.”
As the second stanza begins, the speaker isn’t very interested in the effigies, finding them “plain.” He then notices, however, that the duke is holding his gauntlet (a type of armored glove worn in medieval times) in one hand so that he can hold the countess’s hand with his other one. This sight evokes a tender feeling in the speaker.
Yet he quickly suppresses that feeling. After all, they probably didn’t imagine how long the effigy would last. He begins to convince himself that the “faithfulness” that caught his eye was just a small detail to impress friends and perhaps make their fame last a bit longer.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker begins to focus on the passage of time. Despite remaining lying in one place (“supine stationary”), the effigy of the couple has traveled through centuries. Over time, the feudal system (“tenantry”) that dominated during the couple’s lives would vanish, which they would have never foreseen, and as Latin became less prominent, visitors to the church could only look at their names, not read them.
The effigy has survived through the passage of centuries, as snow and light regularly aged the stone. A succession of birds distracted visitors, while the only other thing remaining unchanged was the church’s cemetery (“bone-riddled ground.”) People continued visiting the church, but they themselves changed drastically over generations.
Over time, the countless visitors who have seen the effigy over centuries have eroded the couple’s identities. The current age has surpassed the days of armor that the couple lived in, and is full of industry (which creates smoke) they never could have dreamed of. In comparison to the passage of time, their brief period in history is a mere “scrap.”
As the line preceding the final verse suggests, all that survives of the couple now is “an attitude”: the romantic symbol of eternal faithfulness their hands represent. Yet the speaker realizes that they likely didn’t intend this symbol to outlast even their names, thus deeming it something “they hardly meant.” He calls the symbol “almost true,” ultimately deciding that what remains of the couple is love.
Analysis
At the start of the first stanza, the effigy’s figures are “blurred” and “vaguely shown,” perhaps because of its age and wear or maybe because the speaker isn’t very focused on them. The man’s “jointed” armor preconfigures the joining of their hands in the next stanza. Larkin varies the poem’s typical meter in the last line of this stanza by using the word “under” rather than “beneath,” drawing special attention to the “absurd” dogs. Yet even though the speaker finds them rather silly, the dogs add a human touch to the effigy—after all, who doesn’t love their dog and wish he could live forever?
Starting the second stanza, the speaker initially finds the figures unremarkable and “plain,” until he notices that they’re holding hands. The repeated “sh” sound in “sharp tender shock” is reminiscent of someone shushing someone else, suiting the cathedral atmosphere. The hands held together in stone seem to the speaker to be a symbol of eternal love, and he is surprisingly touched by the idea that a couple in an era where marriage was rarely about love felt so passionately for each other. The speaker quickly pushes these feelings away at the start of the third stanza, however.
The third stanza begins with a line with a double meaning: the speaker doubts both that the couple thought they would lie together in effigy for so many centuries, and that they expected to "lie"—in the sense of dissimulate—by exaggerating their feelings for each other for so long. The term “sweet commissioned” is oxymoronic; the effigy was created because it was the sculptor’s job, not because he had any affection towards or understanding of the couple. The real intention of the effigy was to preserve the figures’ names, as they were members of the nobility.
The lines of the fourth stanza, are nominally about the effigy’s “stationary voyage” through time. Rather than living forever in heaven, as they likely believed they would, the couple has found a sort of eternal life through the centuries-old stone effigy preserving a memory of them. The feudal system (“tenantry”) vanishing over time also signifies the end of the system that glorified the earl and countess—ironically, had they literally been immortal, their fame would have faded over time, but the effigy preserves their legacy forever.
The fifth stanza brings references to “snow” and “light,” images of purity. As both fell on the effigy, the memory of the couple was sanctified. Larkin underscores the sheer age of the effigy by referencing birdcalls, which are beautiful but impermanent—birds die over time, and they migrate away in the winter. Only the effigy and the bones buried in the graveyard remain the same.
The verb “washing,” which begins the sixth stanza, has a double meaning—over time, the visitors washed away, or corroded, the couple’s identities (by touching the effigy, but also by not understanding who they were), but also blessed them (“washing” carries a connotation of washing away sins.) The “unarmorial age” highlights the obsolescence of the earl’s armored outfit.
Finally, the speaker decides that the couple’s “blazon”— a formal description of a coat of arms that allows readers to reconstruct it—is not their names or noble attire, but the couple’s hands intertwined, signifying their love. Here, in the last stanza, he makes their situation universal, stating that they represent “our almost-instinct,” suggesting skepticism about whether love is actually a human instinct. “What will survive of us is love” is ambiguous: “us” could be simply the couple, stated from their point of view, or all of humanity.
