Time (Personified Force)

Time in "An Arundel Tomb" functions as the poem's silent, sovereign antagonist — a force whose long, patient work shapes everything the speaker and reader can perceive. Larkin presents Time as neither benevolent nor straightforwardly cruel; it is indifferent, operating across centuries with an erosive momentum that no human craft or feeling can fully withstand. Its presence saturates every stanza, felt in the worn stone, the fading inscriptions, and the gap between what the sculptor intended and what survives. Far from being a background abstraction, Time is the poem's engine: without its centuries of labour, there would be no ambiguity, no emotional charge, and ultimately no poem.

Time has no motivation in any conscious sense, which makes it unsettling. Its arc is simply the arc of erosion moving toward a kind of ironic transformation. In the poem's early stanzas, Time works as a destroyer, gradually stripping away the identifiers that gave the tomb its original meaning — the "Latin names" grow "half-effaced," the heraldic detail fades. This is the slow, grinding phase of Time's operation. But Larkin pivots sharply in the penultimate stanza with the observation that "Time has transfigured them into / Untruth." Here Time crosses from mere erosion into active distortion. It does not simply delete; it rewrites. By removing context, it allows the clasped hands — likely a compositional convention for the sculptor rather than an expression of personal devotion — to accumulate emotional meaning they were never designed to carry. Time's arc is therefore paradoxical: it diminishes and, through that very diminishment, amplifies.

The most critical moment attributed to Time is the line "Time has transfigured them into / Untruth" (stanza five). Larkin's word choice is exact and devastating: "transfigured" carries religious overtones of transformation into something higher or more radiant, yet the destination is "Untruth." Time has performed a kind of false miracle. Equally important is the cumulative picture of erosion in the opening stanzas — the "sharp tender shock" the observer feels looking at the joined hands is only possible because Time has worn away everything else that might compete for attention. The half-effaced Latin names are not a minor detail; they signal that Time has already claimed the legible, verifiable record, leaving only the ambiguous gesture. Finally, the closing line — "What will survive of us is love" — operates as Time's ultimate product: a statement wrung from centuries of loss that may itself be the untruth Time manufactured.

With the Earl and Countess: Time treats the two effigies with identical impartiality. It erodes the Earl's heraldic imagery and wears his name toward illegibility; it subjects the Countess to the same attrition, leaving her identity "half-effaced." Yet in erasing the specificity of each figure, Time paradoxically fuses them — what remains most legible is the shared gesture of the clasped hands. The individuals dissolve while the bond, real or constructed, endures.

With the Observer: Every judgment the observer makes is conditioned by what Time has chosen to leave standing. The observer cannot read the full inscription, cannot decode the heraldry, cannot know whether the hand-holding was convention or confession. Time has curated the observer's emotional experience by attrition, making the surviving gesture do far more interpretive work than it was designed for. The observer's "sharp tender shock" is, in a real sense, Time's creation.

With meaning itself: Most profoundly, Time is in relationship with signification. It does not merely destroy objects; it severs signs from their original referents, producing meanings that belong to later centuries rather than to the sculptor or the deceased. This makes Time the poem's most powerful author — the one who determines, through removal, what the tomb ultimately "says."