CATHEDRAL MUSINGS: LARKIN, WILDER, AND THE MUTABILITY TRADITION

alindon, tom, mc;

Thornton Wilder’s tragic and elegiac historical novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) focuses throughout on the universal themes of death, transience, and love; the historical past serves mainly to enhance its concern with time and what if anything will survive it. The resemblances of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ to this neglected American masterpiece are striking and justify a claim for what Harold Bloom would have termed an anxious influence. Grounded alike in the mutability tradition, both compositions move from the start towards a memorable, last-sentence declaration about the interdependence of love and survival. The argument for Larkin’s link with Wilder is strengthened by the fact that in a number of his poems his compositional method is to invoke a previous version of the same theme and engage in a process of similitude and differentiation. An examination of Larkin’s intense focus on the action of time in the rest of his poems demonstrates the remarkable extent to which the mutability tradition informs his work but shows also that the question of personal survival (explicit in Wilder) is unique among his poems to ‘An Arundel Tomb’.