In-Class Essay #1

 In W. H. Auden’s excerpt “Poetry as Memorable Speech”, Auden says “Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: ‘memorable speech’’. What he is saying is that good poetry is poetry that people remember, the kind that speak to you. I would have to say I agree with Auden to an extent because sometimes a poem could just not be memorable to me personally, which doesn’t mean it is a bad poem and everyone agrees. One poet who is an example of someone who doesn’t always have the most interesting poems in my opinion is Philip Larkin. In his poem, “An Arundel Tomb” he writes about this tomb stone he sees of a couple holding hands that everyone comes to admire because they think they’re this big symbol of eternal love, but Larkin writes that it was not their intention to be remembered this way. The poem as a whole, I don’t find very memorable until you get to the end. Larkin ends “An Arundel Tomb” with “The stone fidelity they hardly meant have come to be their final blazon, and to prove our almost – instinct almost – true: What will survive of us is love”. I think this line is beautiful and so true, I’ve always heard the saying that love can survive anything but it’s not true, it’s almost – true, I love the way he puts it.  Like we talked in class, that’s just a very memorable way to end his poem, bringing truth to the old saying, everyone wants to believe that love will survive anything but it’s not always true which is what he’s leaving us with; love really doesn’t always survive.

I think the tone of this poem is sort of gleeful – mournful because he’s talking about these statues who are in love still and everyone admires their tomb but then ends with saying that they had no intention of wanting to be remembered as this couple in love, they didn’t want this to be their final message. I think it turns to the more mournful part in the final stanza beginning with “Time has transfigured them into untruth”, I feel like this is when the tone changes because its saying over time they’ve been turned into a lie. That their love did not survive eternity.

            Also in Auden’s “Poetry as Memorable Speech” he says, “Everything that we remember no matter how trivial...are equally the subject of poetry”. In Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb” he takes these two pieces of stone and turns it into a poem about whether or not love with survive. As I mentioned, Larkin writes that this couple had not intended for their tomb to be this symbol of love, but how does Larkin know that? He writes all about it, but who knows whether he is right or not, no one can speak to the couple. Which I think makes the poem even more memorable because he is literally just looking at this couple’s tomb stone and just imagining that this is really how they feel. He took a simple statue showing a couple in love that everyone admired and turned it into a lie.

            When I started out writing this assignment I did not think “An Arundel Tomb” was a very memorable poem but now that I’ve talked about it so much, I don’t think I’ll ever forget this poem. I especially will never forget the message he leaves us with, that’s what makes it a good poem. So I would have to say I agree with Auden,  the simplest definition for a good poem is memorable.