- This Be The Verse
"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 ofNew Humanist , and appeared in the1974 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 'sLake 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 theUnited 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 oforal tradition , and may be on its way to becoming an undergroundnursery 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 theFree Speech Movement created a broad difference between the speech habits of young and old, Larkin skillfully alludes to matters such associal Darwinism and the violentnationalism s of previous generations to deflate nostalgic beliefs that the world was much better managed and mannered in past eras.ee also
*
List of poems by Philip Larkin References
* [http://www.slate.com/id/2101346/ "The Poet of Dirty Words: History takes a second look at Philip Larkin"] by Stephen Burt at
slate.com .
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