19 pages • 38 minutes read
Philip LarkinThis Be the Verse
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Hand-Me-Down Misery
The poem’s message is that people are inevitably hurt by those closest to them— their parents—the very people who are supposed to nourish and raise them. The fact that they do not intend to mess up their children’s lives—they were simply unable to prevent the passing down through inheritance of their faults—is part of what makes this generational inheritance so tragic to the speaker. The implication is fatalistic since inheritance cannot be undone: Previous generations were no happier, and your unhappiness was foreordained since all people’s faults are passed down to the succeeding generation in perpetuity.
That is the opinion of Larkin’s speaker. It might be said that he is unfair, in the sense that he presents only one side of the story; in reality, people are a mixture of virtues and vices, good qualities and not-so-good qualities, so it stands to reason that their offspring would inherit some of the good and some of the bad. However, a poet is not like an objective reporter, presenting both sides of an issue from a neutral position. Larkin’s speaker is unwilling to acknowledge that human life is any more than an accumulation of inherited “faults” (Line 3), and he is so adamant about this, and expresses it in such forceful, colloquial language, that it is almost as if he is daring the reader to disagree with him.
Compassion and Self-Reflection
Compassion might seem an unlikely theme in a poem that emphasizes how misery is the essence of the human experience. However, the speaker’s message is that this inevitable misery is not the reader’s—or anyone’s—fault: It is entirely beyond one’s control. Just as no one asks to be born, no one can select their parents or children. Whatever failings a person may have, they are not to blame for them. They had no choice, and there is therefore no need to be hard on oneself about it.
Usually, this kind of reasoning points blame away from the self and directs it at someone else. In this case, while the speaker acknowledges that an individual grows up at the mercy of their parents’ failings, he contends that the parents’ harm wasn’t intentional. They inherited their faults, too, and they had no control over any particular qualities of theirs that they passed on to their children. Children and parents are in the same boat in that respect and can only have compassion for one another. One may question where this stance leaves ideas like accountability and self-awareness; if everyone is aware that they have inherited faults, some might feel compelled through their own sense of compassion to work on themselves and ensure that they pass down as few of those inherited faults as possible. In the 1910s and early 1920s, when Larkin was writing, self-help was not a genre, and psychoanalysis was only beginning to be known outside Freud’s inner circles. In this context, Larkin’s call for compassion may have been the closest one could come to self-reflection about the unspoken dynamics of parent-child relationships.
The speaker notes that the same applies to the mass of humanity, generation after generation; it is caught in the inescapable, deeply flawed conditions of its being. We are all prisoners, but it is no one’s fault; the jailer is the impersonal, inescapable process of life, which must be endured. There is therefore no one to blame, and when blame ends, compassion can begin.
Harm Reduction and the Possibility of Freedom
The poem is not optimistic about the chance of living a happy, fulfilled life, but it does offer a harm-reduction strategy that might even be seen as an escape to freedom. This two-pronged strategy is available to a person who desires to escape the relentless passing on of misery from one generation to the next. First, you must “[g]et out as early as you can” (Line 11). That is, you must minimize the influence your parents exert on you by striking out for independence. Leave the family home. Build a life for yourself. That is the only option available, the speaker asserts. Readers might note that what he does not say is that although this might seem doable in theory, wherever one goes, they take themselves and their problems with them. It is not so easy to just break away; in the context of this poem, the inherited faults have become part of the very being of the person and cannot just be wished away by moving to another location. Nevertheless, Larkin’s speaker offers the “get out” strategy as at least something a person can do to escape a negative family dynamic.
The second part of the strategy is to exercise one’s freedom not to procreate. That way, a person will not pass on their faults to their child, and they will not get tangled up in another unhappy family situation. It is therefore not inevitable that humanity should pass on misery to humanity. It is possible to opt out, as Larkin himself did, by neither marrying nor fathering children. In opting out, such an individual does their part in trying to break the never-ending chain of inherited fault that afflicts all of humanity. If everyone did this, of course, the human race would soon come to an end. One senses, however, that Larkin’s speaker would think this is probably not such a bad idea.
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