I am not at all suggesting that Larkin meant this double meaning I have no reason to think he did. I find it interesting to compare “to fuck up” with other verb phrases that contain the preposition “up”: “Hey, Nellie,” an imaginary man named Harold says, “Why don’t you whip up a batch of cookies? I’ll go to the garden and dig up some potatoes for dinner, and then we can go into the bedroom and fuck up some kids.” It’s true that sexuality can create and destroy in nearly equal measure: sex creates children, of course, and can also engender closeness and intimacy, but it can also destroy families, relationships, and individual happiness, confidence, and dignity. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a few liberties with the poem’s opening stanza in particular, I want to do some playing around with the phrase “to fuck up.” We all know what it means, of course – to cause trouble, to damage, to destroy – and I find it interesting that we’ve chosen to use a sexual term to describe acts of blundering and incompetence (we do the same thing, by the way, with the more family-friendly “to screw up”). It’s not the kind of poem that leaves you. Is the first line of “This Be the Verse” the most famous opening line in English-language poetry? It probably hasn’t overtaken “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” or “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” quite yet, but only because so few people read poetry once they’re finished with high school English, and most high school teachers (I generalize) are not comfortable heading out into the minefield of “This Be the Verse.” If every ninth grader in the country read this poem, they would remember it – by heart – forever. Long story.) that it occurred to me that a sampler of “This Be the Verse,” all neatly stitched up in blue thread and featuring rocking horses and teddy bears in its margins would finally give the poem the irony I desperately thought it needed. It was only years later (about a year ago, actually, when I was briefly considering opening a Larkin-themed Etsy store. Hanging mid-twentieth century English poems with the F-word in them on the wall of an infant’s bedroom is one of those things one talks about but never does. She loved the idea (N.B: Writer friends are awesome!), and we shared some good laughs at the idea, but of course I never stitched the sampler. I had trouble understanding how this poem could be both good and earnest at the same time.Īround that time, a good friend of mine was expecting her first child, and I joked with her that I would cross-stitch a sampler of “This Be the Verse” to hang over her baby’s crib. This possibility led me to another troubling idea: it seemed for a while as if, without irony, “This Be the Verse” actually wasn’t a very good poem – not much more than schoolboy doggerel, its rhyme and meter existing only as a pretty frame around the F-word, which is the center of the poem’s energy. I began the process of slowly accepting the idea that Larkin meant every word of “This Be the Verse” as straightforward truth. His bleak view of the human race could not be explained away with terms like “persona” and “transferred epithet” and “sympathetic fallacy.” He was a depressed librarian who looked like a toad and lived in near-solitude during England’s bleakest years of postwar austerity. What I found, of course, was that Philip Larkin was just as unhappy and misogynistic as his poems make him seem. I did some research on Larkin, confident that I would find that he was a family man with twelve kids, a rotund but happy wife, and a bunch of sheepdogs. If there’s one thing I didn’t like when I was in grad school, it was literature that challenged me to rethink my worldview. I’d like to say that I had read enough of Larkin’s to know that much of it is grounded in irony, but what’s closer to the truth is that I wanted the poem to conform to my own presumptions of adulthood and childbirth and parenting. In graduate school I loved Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” – who doesn’t? – but I was determined to find it somehow ironic.
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