This Be the Verse

“This Be The Verse” is a lyric poem in three four-line stanzas by Philip Larkin, one of England’s most popular post–World War II poets. It was published in the New Humanist in 1971 and reprinted in Larkin’s fourth and last volume of verse, High Windows, in 1974. The poem is about how children are negatively affected by the flawed personal characteristics that they inherit from their parents, and this inheritance from generation to generation creates a never-ending chain of human unhappiness. In its pessimism, it is a typical Larkin poem.

Since publication, “This Be The Verse” has become one of the best-known poems by a British poet of the last half-century, especially its memorable, if provocative, first line. Renowned British musician David Bowie quoted the first and last stanzas in a television interview in 2002, when he was asked about his relationship with his parents. Also, in 2009, a British appeal court judge who was presiding over a divorce case that involved custody of a nine-year-old child quoted the entire first stanza as a warning to quarreling parents that their disputes hurt their children.

The edition used in this study guide is from Larkin’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus, Giroux and The Marvell Press, 1988; third American printing, 1989, p. 180).

Poet Biography

England’s most popular poet of the second half of the 20th century, Philip Larkin was born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry, Warwickshire, in the English Midlands. He was the son of Sydney Larkin, who was the Coventry city treasurer, and Eva Larkin. Philip had a sister, Catherine, who was 10 years his senior. Encouraged by his father, as a boy, Larkin read English poetry and novels and also began a lifelong interest in jazz. In 1940, during World War II, he entered St. John’s College, Oxford, graduating with a degree in English in 1943. He was exempt from military service because of poor eyesight. After graduation, he became librarian of a small public library in Wellington, Shropshire. He would remain a librarian all his life.

In 1945, Larkin’s first collection of poetry, The North Ship, was published. Larkin had not yet found his distinctive poetic voice, and these poems were much influenced by leading poets of the day, such as W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. In the same year, Larkin became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester, and his novel, Jill, was published. A second novel, A Girl in Winter, followed two years later. At that stage in his life, Larkin regarded himself more as a novelist than a poet, although he never finished another novel.

Larkin took up his third job as a librarian in 1950, when he became a sub-librarian at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1951, he arranged for his collection of 20 poems, titled XX Poems, to be privately printed at his own expense. The book received almost no acknowledgment from the literary world.

Success came to Larkin in 1955, with the publication of The Less Deceived, which was selected as a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement. In the same year, Larkin became librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, in northeastern England. He would remain in that position for the rest of his life.

In 1961, Larkin used his background in jazz to review the musical genre for the Daily Telegraph, which he continued to do until 1971. In 1964, his poetry collection The Whitsun Weddings was published. It became Larkin’s most celebrated book, appealing to poetry critics and enthusiasts as well as the general public. People recognized something quintessentially English about Larkin’s work, a resigned pessimism that seemed to capture the national mood of the 1950s and 1960s. Larkin’s success continued the following year, when he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Arts.

In 1973, Larkin edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. His choice of poems reflected his own tastes. He championed the poetry of Thomas Hardy, including 27 Hardy poems, while including only nine by T. S. Eliot. The collection proved popular with readers but controversial among academic reviewers.

In 1974, the publication of another volume of poetry, High Windows, which includes “This Be The Verse,” cemented Larkin’s popularity. Although Larkin published a few poems in the mid- and late 1970s (including the famous “Aubade”), High Windows was his last book. In 1984, he declined an invitation to become Poet Laureate following the death of John Betjeman. Larkin died of cancer on December 2, 1985, in Hull, at the age of 63. His Collected Poems was published in 1988.

Poem Text

Larkin, Philip. “This Be the Verse.” 1971. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem is broken into three four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter and follows an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme. The speaker addresses the second-person “you” and presumably stands in for the poet.

In the poem, the speaker complains about the negative influence that parents have on their children, both through their inherited flaws and parenting choices. In the first stanza, the speaker uses an expletive to express the notion that parents mess up their children’s lives because they pass down all their own faults. The second stanza qualifies this by stating that parents cannot be blamed for it, since their own parents did the same thing to them. The third stanza asserts that the human lot is an unhappy one because each generation passes on its personal failings to the next, thus deepening the collective pain and unhappiness. The poem ends with the speaker advising others to escape from the influence of their parents and to avoid having children so as not to continue the cycle.