This Be the Verse

Stanza 1

In this short lyric poem, the unnamed speaker (presumably a stand-in for Philip Larkin himself) adopts a colloquial, direct, but also philosophical tone that is intended to amuse as well as express a truth about human nature. The poem uses three stanzas of four-line iambic tetrameter and an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme to create a lilting but fast-paced rhythm. In the first stanza, rhyming one-syllable words like “do / you” and “dad / had” establishes a casual, accessible register, and the end-stopped lines signal a straightforward syntax that allow the reader to pause and think about each line before proceeding to the next.

The speaker uses the phrase “they fuck you up” in Line 1 to describe how parents negatively influence their children’s lives. The irreverent word choice is designed to get the reader’s attention and indicates that the speaker will not sugarcoat what he has to say. The poem is written as both a direct address to “you,” the reader, and as a general statement about the nature of families. The speaker is not angry or bitter, and there is affection discernible in his use of the informal terms like “mum and dad” (Line 1) rather than father and mother (“mum” is the preferred spelling in England of the American “mom”). He does not blame the parents, writing, “They may not mean to, but they do” (Line 2). His intention is not to attack his or anyone else’s parents, since they are victims too, caught in a generational process over which they have no control, as the next stanza will explain. Line 3 explains that the speaker is talking about biological inheritance: Parents pass on to their children not only their physical characteristics but also aspects of their personalities, especially their faults, which the children are then stuck with for the rest of their lives. The parents also inflict more damage on the child during its upbringing, as Line 4 shows: They “add some extra, just for you.”

Stanza 2

In the second stanza, the speaker moves back one generation in order to further develop his argument. Parents who spoil their children’s lives were also damaged by their own parents; they are just passing on what they inherited, so it is not really their fault. Given that Larkin was born in 1922, the previous generation of parents would have been born in the mid-1880s or ’90s, accounting for their “old style hats and coats” (Line 6). Notably, Larkin does not mention specific dates in the stanza, so the parent-child relationship could apply to anyone in any generation. Larkin’s speaker regards these older-generation parents as “fools” (Line 6) who presumably knew little about parenting and had attitudes that he regards as unhelpful.

“Sop” is a British colloquialism for someone who is drunk or a verb for the act of drinking alcohol copiously. “[S]oppy-stern” (Line 7) refers to the parents being drunk and lecturing either the children or one another with an inebriated, mock seriousness. Larkin’s speaker may have in mind a scene in which the parents believe their children need to be raised in a strict manner. This seems to have been a typical mindset for Victorian parents, derived in part from their Christian beliefs. According to this view, children inherit a sinful nature due to the fall of humanity described in the Bible’s book of Genesis; they therefore had to be subject to firm discipline that would break their naturally rebellious wills and train them to be civilized. Line 8 explains that when these parents were not being “soppy-stern,” they were “at one another’s throats” (Line 8). In other words, they were not happily married and spent half their time quarreling with each other. The poem’s scenario depicts an emotional environment that would have created a difficult and confusing home life for children.

Stanza 3

The final stanza offers a general conclusion about the lamentable reality of life and, in the last two lines, gives a firm piece of advice. In this stanza, countless generations have come and gone. Each generation of parents inevitably passes on its own measure of unhappiness to its offspring, and the effect is cumulative. This implies that no one comes into the world with a clean slate, so to speak.

Although the speaker does not name it, this has parallels to the Christian doctrine of original sin, in which every human being born into the world inherits a sinful nature due to the transgression of the two original parents, Adam and Eve, as described in the Book of Genesis. Larkin’s speaker, however, adds something new: The load that each generation has to carry, inherited from the parents, gets heavier and more onerous over the vast stretch of time. As Lines 9 and 10 state, “Man hands on misery to man, / It deepens like a coastal shelf.” A coastal shelf is the edge of a land mass that slopes down gradually to the seabed. Larkin’s simile means that human distress increases with each generation, just as the coastal shelf builds up layers of sediment over time that make it thicker.

In the final two lines, the speaker offers advice about how to mitigate the situation: “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself” (Lines 11-12). By “get out,” he means leave the family home as soon as possible, so as to escape the influence of parents to the extent that this is possible. The final line is designed to ease the pain of human life. The speaker advises everyone to remain childless, as this is the only way of mitigating the inherited misery of humankind. The casual diction in the last line contrasts with the high rhetorical style of the stanza’s first line, and this indicates a tongue-in-cheek tone in the speaker’s suggestion, which undercuts the poem’s pessimism.