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Friday
For a light note following a grim week, I share today Adrian Mitchell’s wonderful takeoff of Philip Larkin’s much quoted “This Be the Verse,” which begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do.” In an off-color way, Larkin’s lyric has practically achieved the status of a folk epigram. I love the little twist that ends that stanza:
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Larkin goes on to describe a hellish and inescapable cycle, but because he does so in a lilting, almost nursery rhyme sort of way, he shields the reader from the grimness of his message:
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
As much fun as I’ve had with the poem, which allows one to vent in moments of frustration, it actually doesn’t describe my own reality whereas the following parody, sent to me by my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, does so. “This Be the Worst” lacks Larkin’s bite but, for many of us, it’s truer to life:
This Be the Worst
By Adrian Mitchell
(after hearing that some sweet innocent
thought that Philip Larkin must have written:
‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad’)
They tuck you up, your mum and dad,
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.
My parents read me Peter Rabbit when I was young—I remember being terrified of Mr. McGregor—and whatever Freudian tussles I had with them were far outweighed by all the gifts they imparted. It means a lot that my son shared the poem with me.
So take that, Philip Larkin!
Note: Larkin takes his title, I assume, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s powerful poem “Requiem,” which serves as the epitaph on his grave. Does this mean that “get out as early as you can” is meant to serve as his own epitaph? Here’s Stevenson:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.Perhaps the always ironic Larkin regards Stevenson’s poem as “soppy stern.” I certainly can’t imagine him reading Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses to any children he might have had, as I did to mine.
