Greetings,
I'd be interested if you'd bequeath us a bit more of what your research led you to conclude regarding the monuments of the title being inside the church. To me, there is, within the poem, not only the lines Robert refers to - that do, to me also, suggest a hypothesized image of headstones falling over the bodies they seek to honor - but also the word "below" in the final stanza ("Mark here below / How tame these ashes are").
In the Arundel Tomb you cite by comparison, it's such a unique tomb (apparently) that it makes me wonder if you think Herbert might conceivably even have been thinking of (or reacting to a visit to) Chichester Cathedral himself. I wouldn't have thought so, but now just wondering if that's part of your thinking. I've spent my share of hours in a mausoleum, and in visiting such churches as might be Herbert's but it seems unusual that the burial plots inside churches themselves would be in the ground. The Chichester Cathedral seems to have one such - with a "Roman mosaic pavement" visible through a floor window, as I understand it (albeit from wikipedia) - Is that the kind of image you have of Herbert's setting? Rather than burials like "chest tombs" - which would leave me head-scratching about why he says "Mark here below" ...
I did also find this in wiki re "Church memorials" (which I hadn't realized is a specific referent rather than a generic one that Herbert had used - although not clear whether the phrase had this specific meaning in his day - and even this meaning is 'flexible' according to wiki):
Church monuments – within a church (or tomb-style chests in a churchyard) may be places of interment, but this is unusual; they more commonly stand over the grave or burial vault rather than containing the actual body and are therefore not tombs -- <link>
from The Times Online:
<link>
and - lo and behold - Arundel Tomb has its own wiki site -
<link> - complete with photos of the sculpture/tomb in question ...
An Arundel Tomb
by Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
From The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
