On Philip Larkins This Be The Verse
This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin They *censored* you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were *censored*ed up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were sloppy-stern And half at one another's throats. It deepens like a coastal shelf. And don't have any kids yourself. Lately, I have read a good deal of poems by Philip Larkin, and one unifying factor that I have noticed is that Larkin never seems to use a filler. Every word in every one of his poems seems to be carefully crafted and placed, to the point where the flow and rhythm of the poem seem almost an accident. One poem I read that really stayed with me is the above poem, "This be the Verse." I will now show you how this poem, which at first glance seems to be written only to amuse, really has a much deeper meaning. I will examine the poem in several parts. First, I would like to examine the use of curse words in the poem, or why other words that would be considered more acceptable to the general publ
The second line in this poem contains the word "*censored*," a word that is usually not considered acceptable for the general public. Yet Larkin incorporates it almost immediately into his poem. Larkin's poem is divided into three stanzas, each with it's own meaning and objectives. Then, I will discuss the three stanzas of the poem and what they were meant to do for the audience. Lately, "modern" art and poetry are showing more and more "unacceptable" words. This is because such words have become synonymous with "truth. As discussed above, the first stanza singles out a select group of people and builds Larkin's credibility with them. Like all of his poems, Larkin wrote "This be the Verse" with very careful planning and word placement. The last two lines of the second stanza describe how the readers grandparents (or whomever the blame is being shifted on) went about "*censored*ing you up. " In other words, the general public seems to feel that if an artist is using curse words, then he must be "telling it like it is. All the way through a country's internal problems, a city's problems, a family's problems and the problems one has with oneself. But beyond that, the first stanza also inspires several other feeling in the reader, just from the actual words it uses. By the third and forth line, the insult has been successfully shifted from your parents to you, the reader. " Thus, using such words helps Larkin's credibility as a man who has seen and will now tell.
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