ABSTRACT
The three poems quoted above were each included by their authors at the ends of collections (The Whitsun Weddings in the case of Larkin, and the Collected Poems of both Causley and Thomas).1 A poet naturally chooses which poem to put at the end of a book with great care; Causley once told Ronald Tamplin that it was essential to ‘make sure the first and last poems are right’,2 and Larkin noted in an interview that he takes ‘great care’ when deciding the ordering of poems in a collection, and that the last one ‘is chosen for its uplift quality’.3 As such, it is interesting that all three poems are essentially celebratory and deal, one way or another, with the endurance of a marriage. The earl and countess in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ hold hands ‘in effigy’, and though this is nothing more than a ‘commissioned’ gesture, not necessarily representative of relations between the medieval couple, the speaker is moved towards the aphoristic, quixotically apophthegmatic – albeit heavily qualified and tentative – conclusion that ‘What will survive of us is love’. ‘A Marriage’ is one of Thomas’s several elegies to his
1 Causley’s first Collected Poems ended instead with ‘A Wedding Portrait’. That book was published in 1975, before ‘Eden Rock’ had been written; all subsequent updated editions ended with ‘Eden Rock’.
