This Be the Verse

“This Be The Verse” is a lyric poem in three four-line stanzas by Philip Larkin, one of England’s most popular post–World War II poets. It was published in the New Humanist in 1971 and reprinted in Larkin’s fourth and last volume of verse, High Windows, in 1974. The poem is about how children are negatively affected by the flawed personal characteristics that they inherit from their parents, and this inheritance from generation to generation creates a never-ending chain of human unhappiness. In its pessimism, it is a typical Larkin poem.

Since publication, “This Be The Verse” has become one of the best-known poems by a British poet of the last half-century, especially its memorable, if provocative, first line. Renowned British musician David Bowie quoted the first and last stanzas in a television interview in 2002, when he was asked about his relationship with his parents. Also, in 2009, a British appeal court judge who was presiding over a divorce case that involved custody of a nine-year-old child quoted the entire first stanza as a warning to quarreling parents that their disputes hurt their children.

The edition used in this study guide is from Larkin’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus, Giroux and The Marvell Press, 1988; third American printing, 1989, p.