Listening Cherry 18 – Larkin’s line survives the plethora

Image from here.

This post follows on from Listening Cherry 17. It continues to consider, guided by Sir Christopher Ricks’s commentary, the intonation of the final line of Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb.

What will survive of us is love.

Ricks writes:

… If you were to stress both ‘survive’ and ‘us’, the line would not survive the plethora; and if you were to stress neither, the line would not survive the inanition. (277)

When I read a piece of literary criticism like this I feel as happy as a cat having its tummy tickled. I purr with pleasure at the fine language and the skilled use of rare words (plethora/inanition) – which, crucially, I understand. I feel pleased with myself that the distant edges of my knowledge of vocabulary was tested and I did OK!

But hang on, I think he means something here. Oh yes, he is saying that if you stress both ‘survive’ and ‘us’ the line will be overloaded and will die.

I know it’s unfair, and I know it’s not done with this type of literary criticism (we should just lie back and purr)  … but what if we were to treat this statement as a testable hypothesis? (Criminally prosaic, perhaps – but fun). We could listen to the two recordings which Larkin himself made which had something close the plethoric pattern that Ricks says is unsurvivable, and see what we think of them.

Here’s one.

|| WHAT will surVIVE of US || is LOVE ||

Here’s the second.

|| WHAT will surVIVE of US || is LOVE ||

Hmm. Both these readings give the line four prominences:

|| WHAT will surVIVE of US || is LOVE ||

And I think the line survives very well. But to be fair, maybe what Ricks means is not ‘stress’ but tonic placement, and he is would have the line spoken with ‘survive’ and ‘us’ as tonic in separate speech units:

|| WHAT will surVIVE || of US || is LOVE ||

And I believe that the line survives. ELT sometimes commits the same error: we discuss with great precision the significance of an intonational phenomenon without taking into account the other intonational phenomena that are going on around it. And we certainly believe the pronouncements of great men and women in our field, without evaluating what they say by listening to evidence (it would be so disrespectful to do so!).

And just before I go, here is the inanition version – I attempt to give a prominence-free version:

|| what will survive of us is love ||

(You have to imagine that I preceded the line with the words ‘but I didn’t say’, giving us a double prominence speech unit with a long non-prominent tail:

|| but i DIDn’t SAY what will survive of us is love ||

And I believe that Ricks is right about that one! It is diabolically inanitious*.

Ricks, C. (1984). The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.