This Be The Verse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"This Be The Verse" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985). It was written around April 1971, first published in the August 1971 issue of New Humanist, and appeared in the 1974 collection High Windows.

This Be The Verse is perhaps Larkin's best known (and almost certainly his most frequently quoted) poem. Larkin himself compared it with W. B. Yeats's Lake Isle of Innisfree and said he expected to hear it recited in his honour by a thousand Girl Guides before he died. It appears in its entirety on more than a thousand web pages. It is frequently parodied. Television viewers in the United Kingdom voted it one of the "Nation's Top 100 Poems".

Indeed, it is quoted on occasions by people who do not know they are quoting Larkin. It is brief and memorable enough that many who read it are then able to recite it from memory, and do so to others, who also remember it and recite it again with minor variations. It has been heard on the lips of adolescents who do not know who Larkin was. As such, the poem shows signs of having entered the folklore process of oral tradition, and may be on its way to becoming an underground nursery rhyme of sorts, after the manner of Pounds, Shillings, and Pence.

The title of the poem is an allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem, which also contains familiar lines:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson's thought of a happy homecoming in death is given an ironic turn by Larkin.

The title also ironically recalls that recurring phrase from the Old Testament threatening the sins of the parents against their offspring: "for I the Lord, thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me" [Exodus 20:5]. Larkin parodies the divine threat by rewriting the deliberate retribution of an angry vengeful God as the tragic shortcomings of "your mum and dad" (l. 1). This biblical allusion injects a homiletic quality into the unabashedly profane poem and hints at a certain awareness on Larkin's part that, of all his poems, this one will be the poem his readers will remember.

Of course, part of the effect of Larkin's poem comes from its use of the word fuck in the opening line "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." The word here retains some power to startle, largely because it contrasts with the traditional metre and form of Larkin's poem, which moves from a coarse beginning to an elegant conclusion. Appearing at a time when the "generation gap" and recent countercultural issues such as the Free Speech Movement created a broad difference between the speech habits of young and old, Larkin skilfully alludes to matters such as social Darwinism and the violent nationalisms of previous generations to deflate nostalgic beliefs that the world was much better managed and mannered in past eras.