This Be the Verse
So Larkin's title immediately puts his poem in a context of death: Stevenson's poem is about a man nearing the end of his life, without regrets; there's Requiem as the title, of course; there are puns on will in the last line of the first quatrain (willingness to do something / legal document related to one's death) & grave in the first line of the second quatrain (engrave / burial place), &, more specifically, the phrase Larkin took as his title leads directly to the epitaph Stevenson's speaker would like. But the title's reference to Stevenson's poem also puts us in a very literary context: the correct but perhaps archaic use of the subjunctive be in This be the verse; the dry & somber diction; the echoes & evocations of Biblical language in Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill). Stevenson's poem also has a very formal, regular structure: two quatrains, regular four-beat iambic lines, & a very regular rhyme scheme, with the first three lines of each quatrain rhyming with themselves (sky, lie, die // me, be, sea), & the last lines of each rhyming with each other (will // hill).
A serious embrace of death, a model of traditional verse-making: Larkin immediately blows up these qualities in Stevenson's poem with his first line. It's difficult now perhaps to recapture the explosive power of fuck in this context, how surprising & funny it was. The word has been degraded by overuse to an irritating verbal tick, its shock nearly worn out. But when Larkin published this poem, in the early 1970s, it was just a few years after the word could legally appear in print in something other than low pornography, & it still didn't generally appear in poetry written in a traditional style, poetry with regular rhymes & rhythms & even indents on the second & fourth lines. & though the first two words – they fuck – gets at the generational realities of the poem (fuck, the act; no talk of love or marriage), the phrase is actually even more colloquial: it's about being fucked up, in this case emotionally & psychologically. There's a refreshing but bleak implicit rejection of traditional filial piety, which substitutes a pretty & generic idealized pair for the actual humans that are one's parents.
The speaker uses a colloquial obscenity, but in a comic way, & he seems to be somewhat mature: he's at a stage of life where he's looking around at the mess he's in, or the mess he is, &, looking for its source, he finds it, not surprisingly, in his source: his mum & dad. But he's moved beyond the angry adolescent phase of self-centered anger & is conscious that the damage may not (though it also may) be intentional. He's seeing his parents as individuals with their own problems, a realization which is always a sign of growing maturity. & he realizes he might be worse than they were: he has their faults but also some extra, added just for you (a hilarious echo of the you're-so-special tone found in marketing appeals & sentimental cards).
In the second quatrain, the speaker more fully explores what happened to his parents (& therefore what happened to him): they too, in their turn, were fucked up. In their turn is part of the speaker's realization of the on-going cyclical damage that travels down the generations. The portrait of the grandparents is harsh, almost contemptuous in its comedy: these fools, outlandishly costumed in "old-style hats and coats", as in an old family photo of the pompously dignified elders (hats & coats, always worn outdoors by respectable citizens; when Larkin was writing, men had started abandoning the obligatory hat, & even jackets were coming off). They were soppy-stern – again, a casual but precise phrasing, combining the perceived sentimentality & repressive respectability of the Edwardian & Victorian forebears. But beneath their façade of propriety they are, for a significant amount of time, at each other's throats – fucking up each other, in the process of fucking up their children. (This would be back in a time when divorce was not only difficult legally & religiously but also socially shameful.)
The final quatrain broadens the generational misery to a general social statement (man in this context means, as it often did then, humanity, not just the male portion of it). The on-going human trauma is like a natural phenomenon: it deepens like a coastal shelf, something mostly unseen, but continually growing, rendering the coastline shifting & potentially dangerous & out of human control. How do you break the cycle of emotional / psychological damage? As the cycle is inevitable, even a force of Nature, the only way to break it is to turn your back on Nature, meaning on life, & to refuse to have any children of your own (you stop the fucking up by stopping fucking). The tone is wistful as well as bleak; kids is a familiar, even loving term, & refusing to cause these potential children damage is a weirdly loving, though negative, act.
Stevenson's poem gives us a man looking back with satisfaction on the labors of his life, looking forward with contentment to well-deserved eternal rest; Larkin, by contrast, gives us a despairing but also comic look (à la Beckett) at the grubby realities of human life. He plays off Stevenson, & off the regularity of his traditional form, with a grim but also witty modern view of things. I think Larkin's is a perfect lyric: he moves, in twelve short lines, from comic shock & anger to a greater understanding of & empathy with others into an expansive requiem for humanity in general. (But as always when an artwork signals a kind of despair, the work's very achievement negates its hopelessness.)
I took this from the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.
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