This Be The Verse
A f***ing good poem
WARNING: This post contains strong language. If that’s not for you, no worries, the next one will be more polite. It also contains affiliate links, but all them have non-affiliate versions in their respective footnotes.
This Be The Verse is a poem by Philip Larkin first published in 1971. It comprises 12 lines, three verses and two “fucks”.
My old head of English, Dr Palmer, introduced me to it while I was studying for my A-Levels1. He was a Larkin devotee and would go on to write a 2008 book about Larkin’s work2 saying (in summary) he was quite deep. Doc Palmer also held a doctorate in jazz, which may well be the coolest kind of doctor you can be.
The problem with poetry is that a lot of it is shite. And the bits that aren’t shite are nonsense. And the bits that aren’t nonsense are generally OK. Some bits, though… some bits are sublime. The wonderful thing about art is how completely subjective it is: what I love, you may hate. What I hate, you may love. Finding your Thing is the joy of art.
Doc Palmer helped steer me towards my Thing (storytelling, writing) by showing me that poetry does not always boil down to simple rhyme schemes for children or epic poems that don’t rhyme and use old words that no one understands. Through his love of all writing, the Doc taught me we can all find things that connect with us.
However grand its buildings (it was a very posh school), I didn’t get on well there. I missed large chunks of it because cystic fibrosis and when I was there I didn’t like it much. I didn’t have many friends and, along with the friends I did have, became Cool Kids’ fodder.
The school’s theatre became my refuge outside of the timetable. It was the reason I fell in love with the school in the first place. It was a proper theatre, not merely a school hall with a raised area at one end and some light stands in a cupboard. It was like stepping into my dreams, if my dreams included exams at the end of the fun bits.
Within the confines of the daily schedule, it was the English department that became the happiest 40 (or 80) minutes I spent at school. It was housed in an old house away from the main school buildings that didn’t feel very different to how it must have felt when it was lived in. None of the rooms had been redesigned, someone just gave them a lick of the special kind of beige paint reserved for classrooms and squeezed in some (small) desks.
The teachers, and the way they went about their jobs, were what made the English department so special. The tone was set in my first year when someone asked Mr MacDowell if we were allowed to swear in our essays. Mr MacDowell was an older teacher with a ready smile, a bounce in his step and a wafting trail of nicotine-scented air that followed him like a three year old in search of a snack. He thought about the question for a moment with the far off look that always gave the impression that he was metaphysically travelling into the recesses of his mind in search of an answer.
“If you’re writing a fiction essay and colourful language is appropriate to the setting and character then, yes, you can swear,” he told us, “But you can’t say ‘Hamlet is a fucking good play.’”
When Doc Palmer introduced us to This Be The Verse, we weren’t even studying Larkin. The Doc enjoyed introducing us to things he thought were interesting and/or added context or colour to what we were reading. I’m sure that was partly to try to keep our attention during the harder slogs of literature, and nothing grabs a class of teenagers quicker than something beginning “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Larkin once wrote, “I suppose the kind of response I am seeking from the reader is, Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that.” It is hard to imagine anything more likely to resonate with teenagers than the idea of your parents being awful.
Larkin has been described as “England’s most miserable genius,” but Martin Amis described many of his lines as having “frictionless memorability,” which is hard to argue given that the opening line of This Be The Verse has been etched in my memory for more than two decades.
Larkin was also a complex and controversial figure. After he died and his personal letters were published, he was accused of “casual misogyny” and racism that threatened to tarnish his reputation, with one reviewer of The Complete Poems3 saying, “The only thing we’re remind of is what a shit Larkin was in real life.”
His friends, however, disputed the claims against him. They painted a picture of a different person and pointed out how frequently he contradicted himself in his letters. While there were definite moments of apparent racism and misogyny, an academic named John Osbourne wrote in 2008 that “the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment.”
Without reading any of his letters, I can’t weigh in on how true the accusations were. I suspect that looked at with our more enlightened eye today, we might see them as more distasteful than people did in the 90s. We also can’t tell whether Osbourne saw things the way he did in the late 2000s because he used similar language or held similar views himself, or if there is genuinely little to find in them.
In the end, his friends’ assertions dismissed the accusations in the public’s mind. In 2003, a survey by the Poetry Book Foundation named Larkin as the most loved poet of the previous 50 years4 and in 2008 The Times named him our greatest post war writer5. In 2016, he was awarded a memorial in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey6, joining legends like Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas and the Williams Shakespeare and Wordsworth.
One outstanding element of his character we can all aspire to is the attention he gave people in conversation.
A long-time friend of Larkin's said,7 “He gave his full attention to everyone he had dealings with. I never had the feeling that he was waiting for a gap in the conversation in order to inject his own views. He seemed invariably to follow one's train of thought rather than his own.”
How many of us can say we achieve that?
Most writers would also identify with his frequent feelings of insecurity and self-criticism. He once called his poem The Trees “very corny” and “bloody awful tripe” (I disagree). He also described Going, Going as “thin ranting conventional gruel.” (I think it is an eery environmental premonition that still looms scarily over us.)
Over the years since the Doc introduced us to Larkin, I have read a fair amount of his poetry. As with all poetry, to refer back to my earlier comments, some of it is wonderful and some of it is shite. But then, if you enjoy every piece of a poet’s work, they are not trying hard enough.
The outstanding feature of This Be The Verse is the way it starts out with the oft-echoed view that parents are always to blame and goes on to point out that every generation has been screwed by the one that came before (“They were fucked up in their turn”).
It may use language that offends some people and is undoubtedly a deeply pessimistic view of the world, but what he says is true nonetheless: each generation shapes the next.
Not only that, but we also pass on the precious world we live in to the next generation and we fuck it up before we do. It is hard to argue with his view when we look at the state of our climate.
Without the brilliance of teachers like Doc Palmer and Mr MacDowell, I would never have discovered how different art forms and artists tell stories that speak to us and reflect more than just their skills with the tools of their trade. I might also never have discovered how to use my tools to tell stories the way I can.
Without Larkin, I may never have reflected on all the good stuff we carry and the bad stuff we drag from our forebears.
This Be The Verse is brilliant in the effectiveness of its storytelling, which is why it has had such an effect on me. The power of language has resonated with me for a long time and for all that it was present in me before, this poem rocket fuelled it for me.
You also can’t deny its central urging: our lives will have been worth something if we can say on our final day that we have not fucked things up for our descendents.
This Be The Verse gets four stars.
Exams taken during the final two years of high school, aged 16-18.
The Times list using the Wayback Machine.
Poet’s Corner is an area in the South Transept (no, I don’t know what that means, either) of the Abbey was named for the high number of memorials to authors, poets and playwrights there. Wikipedia has a good article on Poets’ Corner.
Taken from Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth (this one is the non-affiliate).