“They
fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.”
In
the shadow of the first line, the second never gets enough credit. It’s the
apologetic indecisiveness of “may” that gives the story away and makes the poem.
The meter and rhyme contain the rage like an over-wound alarm clock. In free
verse, the poem would amount to little more than a Sharon Olds tantrum,
relishing its pain. Instead, Larkin, the former novelist, suggests a man and an
oblique narrative, his history in twelve lines. No one can read the poem
impersonally. We gauge ourselves against it and suspect it may be judging us (as children, parents). “This Be the Verse” appeared forty years ago in Larkin’s High Windows, his final volume though he lived another eleven
years. Dave Lee has posted a video of the poem as read by Sir Tom Courtenay,
forever the voice of Ivan Denisovich. Once you get over the gimmick of young
men and women mouthing Courtenay’s voice, the film works as a glimpse at
resignation stunned by melancholy, like Lear after Cordelia’s death. Courtenay’s
voice is grief modulated, untainted by melodrama.
Larkin
took his title from the un-Larkinesque Stevenson. He started writing it in
1967, on the same day he wrote “Annus Mirabilis,” but finished it four years
later. All but eight of its eighty-three
words are monosyllables, and all are common and unpoetic. “Coastal shelf” is perfect
– that vast, submerged, unseen border of a continent, sloping to the ocean bottom.
The poem’s hinge comes in the final two lines. The speaker must do something
with what he knows, so he preaches, unconvincingly. “Get out as early as you
can” is conventionally read as advice to leave home as soon as possible. Might
it not suggest early suicide?
With
time, the obscenity no longer offends. How else could he say it? “Mess you up?”
“Screw you up?” In his notes to the poem in Complete
Poems (2012), Archie Burnett quotes an interview Larkin gave John Haffenden
in 1981 (collected in Further
Requirements, 2002), on the subject of “bad language”: “…these words are
part of the palette. You use them when you want to shock. I don’t think I’ve
ever shocked for the sake of shocking. `They fuck you up’ is funny because it’s
ambiguous. Parents bring about your conception and also bugger you up once you
are born. Professional parents in particular don’t like that poem.”
Clearly,
Larkin enjoyed the poem’s naughty renown, even if that’s not why he wrote it. In
a letter to Judy Egerton in 1982 he writes, with a nice swipe at Yeats: “`They
fuck you up’ will clearly be my Lake Isle of Innisfree. I fully expect to hear
it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before I die.” Donald Justice isn’t taken
in by this. In Touchstones: American
Poets on a Favorite Poem (Middlebury College Press, 1996), Justice selects
Larkin’s “Coming,” written in 1950. He refers in passing to “This Be the Verse”
and “Annus Mirabilis,” saying, “In the hands of a lesser master they might pass
for vers de société, clever and very
fine but not much more than that.” Justice distinguishes several voices in
Larkin’s work, but hears even in these “witty” poems, with their “mordant
strain,” a “note of plangent bitterness or regret, some perhaps sudden invasion
or flash of feeling.”
Larkin’s
best poems imply one reading without eliminating others. Is “This Be the Verse”
an angry protest against child abuse? A misanthrope’s credo? An elegy for lost innocence,
if such a thing can be said to exist? A schoolboy prank, such as Larkin and Kingsley
Amis played all their lives? Is it damning or forgiving? Brutal or sentimental? Donald Justice concludes his essay like this:
“It
has been claimed for Larkin that he was never sentimental, never brutal. But
the truth is that I find him both sentimental and brutal, though in different
poems, or in different parts of the same poem…Irony, diffidence, skepticism,
wit: not all of these together are enough to keep out a certain unreasonableness of feeling—the
sentiment, the sentimentality—that keeps rising up out of Larkin’s poems.
Actually, it is what saves them. Doesn’t everybody really know this?”
[Here
is Larkin reading “This Be the Verse.”]
1 comment:
Marvelous post--that is, I enjoyed every bit of it and even felt like rereading Larkin.
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