This Be the Verse

Opener is all time

And the last verse is wisdom.

4 ftw

yep opener

hoping we dont do a "writers who were/are awful people" thread tho

And the last verse is wisdom.

I used to think this, then I had kids and realised he was an embittered old man fatuously generalising from his own experience. n.b. please confirm this with my kids in 18 odd years.

that's the thing isn't it

coastal shelf

The anger and empathy and humor and sadness condensed into these twelve lines get me every time I think about them.

"coastal shelf" is tragic

Men in old style hats and coats v reminiscent of late yeats

I think the second verse is funny rather than bleak, he's not really suggesting people commit suicide, just laughing at the ridiculous natural conclusion of his blunt, straightforward opening / the general absurdity of existence.

coastal shelf

btw, my mum and dad weren't particularly fucked up, nor were they soppy-stern or at each others throats. they were, of course, flawed humans, but that's a long way from the level of fucked up. the difficulty I have with this poem isn't its poetry, which is sublime, but that it delivers an imbalanced idea so sublimely that it convinces you it is true when it is only half-true.

I think lots of great art does that in one way or another

I agree. But I think it helps to point this out, because the power in great art can knock young people about mercilessly, adding to their natural confusion.

I've always liked "soppy-stern" so that gets my vote

i have always liked "it deepens like a coastal shelf" which is just such a fantastic, unexpected image, a shaft of metaphorical light amid all this blunt talk

one of the best

I used "High Windows" on the first day of my lit classes for years – it never failed to impress the students.

The 2nd line, for the really wicked ambiguity

Which I never noticed until Martin Amis wrote about it somewhere. And, suddenly - OMG!!! Mega Larkin LOLZ!!!

internal rhyme too xpost

My mum and dad were deeply fucked up but this poem didn't seal any universal truths for me just because it's sublimely stated.

Truth ! Beauty and Keats was beautifully full of shite, the poem is either well or badly written etc etc

They may not mean to, but they do.

Wait, what's the "wicked ambiguity" of the second line? "They may not mean to, but they do (fuck you up)" v. "they may not mean to, but they do (mean to)" ?

I always enjoy the shift with "man hands on misery to man" — I assume it's a change in metre that does it, but I know nothing about scansion. But "soppy-stern" has my vote.

i like the ambiguity of ‘they may not mean to’ paired with the definitiveness of ‘but they do’

otm

"May" automatically implies "or may not", but I don't see that ambiguity as especially wicked. It merely asserts that volition is not required for the transaction to occur.

I read it as it not mattering whether they mean to or not, but it certainly cannot be presumed that they don't

If the "fuck you up" can mean that your mum and dad - literally - "fuck you into existence"

Then the 2nd line suggests that "your" very conception is a mistake, let alone what's happened since

Insult to injury, really

Reading "fuck you up" as a sort of equivalent to "dream you up", or "whip you up" like whipping up a meal, seems like a huge reach, in that the common colloquial meaning is so universally understood, while that alternative reading is something I have never encountered before in any form, written or spoken.

I feel that much of the love for this poem is of the "OMG TRUTH BOMB" type - as in, its transgressive sentiment precludes actual criticism. For what it's worth I believe we fuck ourselves up and permit our parents a role in that to varying extents.
"Deepens like a coastal shelf" is not terribly evocative for me - meaning, it gradually deepens and then there's an abrupt drop?

Unless that is part of the design then the 2nd line isn't really doing very much apart from being unusually - for this poem - considerate of parental good intentions

I think it's a valid but unlikely reading but that your dismissal of the second line as considerate under the alternative circumstance is not correct, certainly not necessarily correct at any rate

Don't personally see any ambiguity in the second line. Whether the mean to or not, they *will* fuck you up. Plain as day. (and otm)

"They may not mean to, but they do" reads, idiomatically, as "they do, albeit without meaning to", and then, more literally, archly, cruelly, "they do, though it's possible that they didn't mean to".

Which is exactly the same as what I said :)

I know I just wanted to say it too :)

"coastal shelf"

this is a long way short of his best tho

tbh I only know about ten poems total, plz do feel free to mention others

From Larkin or for cynics to enjoy

"aubade" is a masterpiece

Silby <3

J.D. on the money, that poem destroys me, it's my internal monologue

same

just this last weekend i re-read MCMXIV; the bit that jumps out at me is "And the countryside not caring". i welled up at that.

do people ITT think he was the best of his generation? over-rated? what's your hot Larkin take?

Yep. "Unresting death" destroys me. Two words that became a whole concept for me.

xp

Wow at aubade

Deepens like a coastal shelf" is not terribly evocative for me - meaning, it gradually deepens and then there's an abrupt drop?

Was thinking abt this poem today & nearly quoted it in the Masculinity thread - a weird coincidence

Aubade is my fave too. I also really like ... is it called And The Wave Sings Because It Is Moving? And of course the one about the toad “work”. His Collected is worth shelling out for. Haven’t read him in many years, but huge memorized shards of his work stick in my head. If pressed, I probably know more lines of Larkin by heart than of any other poet.

Larkin generally v good and v accessible - a “pop” poet in a way, tho (of course) not undeserving of serious consideration because of that. I think you can say his best work lacks the depth & richness of (insert “rock” poet here) without meaning it as a knock on him.

In the end his unrelenting pessimism - and his misogyny (fortunately expressed less in his poems than his letters) - makes him a tough gruel for me to stomach too much of at once.

Oh yeah, the mower too! We should be careful of each other; we should be kind / while there is still time.

IT'S A POEM ALL THE LINES COUNT THE SAME

says Mr Never-Polled-A-Poet

Aubade and Water are my favorite Larkin.

Larkin could've been a novelist of exquisite refinement. I loved A Girl in Winter a couple years ago.

Larkin generally v good and v accessible - a “pop” poet in a way, tho (of course) not undeserving of serious consideration because of that. I think you can say his best work lacks the depth & richness of (insert “rock” poet here) without meaning it as a knock on him.

our beloved Harold Bloom considers Robert Lowell and Larkin the most overrated 20th century English poets. I've struggled with Lowell for years, going so far as to read the new psychoanalytic bio and spending a summer with his poetry, but Larkin is like Frost in his accessibility.

IT'S A POEM ALL THE LINES COUNT THE SAME

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Thursday, November 16, 2017 4:51 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

I don't think the poem being a thing negates the possibility that the lines of the poems are themselves things. Both the poem and the lines of the poem, severally, are interesting. And polling the lines of a poem both amuses me and serves as a framing device for considering the poem in its made-up-of-lines aspect.

Many poems rely on a rhythmic shift that also signals an emotional shift. The key line in Thomas Hardy's "The Voice" is, "Thus I; faltering forward..."

coastal shelf

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in.
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

deepens like a coastal shelf

I used "High Windows" on the first day of my lit classes for years – it never failed to impress the students.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, November 16, 2017 1:10 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god "high windows" is my fucking jam

the BBC made a Larkin documentary, in the early 90s I think it was, and they used some footage of a couple of friends of mine playing Frisbee in the park that Larkin's room overlooked to represent the "couple of kids" I guess. It worked pretty neatly

and he was a technician. the accessibility of his verse is deliberate and hard-won. his politics and personali

ty are obviously horrible in a ton of ways but "what will survive of us is love" is bett

er for that. It wasn't sentimentality, it was a reach for goodness in a shitty world that he knew he belonged to

"This Be the Verse" doesn't work as lazy misanthropy. We can feel it because the poet isn't trying to step outside of the shit he's joking about

this may not be his best, but I'm fond of it:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

also NV otm I think... this exchange:

the difficulty I have with this poem isn't its poetry, which is sublime, but that it delivers an imbalanced idea so sublimely that it convinces you it is true when it is only half-true.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:38 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think lots of great art does that in one way or another

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:45 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really tickled me, as I've just been re-reading Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry (1960something) which begins with basically this exact conversation, except Hamburger is defending Rilke's Duino Elegies from the charge of conveying mistaken ideas (or, more precisely, from the kind of criticism that would yoke its aesthetic value qua poetry to the essential rightness or wrongness of its ideas).

"fullgrown thickness" is an apt description of the cluster of consonants in the first two verses of the last stanza.

xp ... the Hamburger book also touches on "Ode on a Grecian Urn," making (or borrowing? I don't have the book at hand to check) the point that, despite what most people would tell you, Keats never said that beauty is truth -- rather, it's what Keats said the urn said; and the ode derives considerable emotional tension from the poet's struggle to believe it.

to Alfred: yes! those lines in the last stanza don't quite make sense to me on the level of literal signification, but I still love the sound of them, which I have heard compared to wind rustling branches

Okay I just looked it up and it makes a bit more sense now that I know "thresh" is an older variant spelling of "thrash," though one that is clearly only there for the rhyme... I think one of the major differences between British poets and American poets is that the latter can't get away with this kind of wordplay.

Love Larkin - completely forgot til now we did him in high school. I always think of the line "past smells of different dinners" when I'm having a stroll in the neighbourhood in the evening.

I was listening to Melvyn Bragg & friends this morning talking g about Germaine de Stael and one of the semi-quotes that was discussed was along the lines of "taste kills genius". Larkin is one of the writers I feel strongly backs up that

Great thread so far

Btw anyone here read that Rilke/Rodin book I’ve had my eye on?

in my head all the time is this fragment from Faith Healing:

...In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.

xp Is that the one from Archipelago Press? I can't say I've read it all through, but I own it, and I don't regret the purchase -- it's a lovely book!

Still find Bleaney mortifying

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Fuck

I'd go back to bed but I mean he's spoiled even that

xp Is that the one from Archipelago Press? I can't say I've read it all through, but I own it, and I don't regret the purchase -- it's a lovely book!

― bernard snowy, Friday, 17 November 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It was issued on Archipelago (although I read a version of that essay years previously). Almost all his writing on art and sculpture is worth anyone's time.

They tuck you up, your mum and dad - I used to say this to my kids every night at bedtime. One day they'll get it.

This parody from Adrian Mitchell was going round the internet last year after being shared by Billy Bragg. I find it massively annoying.

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.

Eurgh Jesus that's awful.

It is in every sense a tribute to the original.

Billy Bragg is one of the biggest twats in the UK, I hate him more than Boris tbh. He is that type of grinding bore that would find something as bad as that witty and amusing.

ffs that is sick. horrible.

i watched love and death in hull recently - where did they get the tape of larkin and his wife singing their own homemade nazi national anthem - that was incredibly dark and creepy imo, like the meticulous nature of it and the fact they were both singing along. also the general idea of him sliding further into heavily drunken nazism in his last days.

i agree about aubade, that is prob my favourite. but afternoons comes in a close second. "something is pushing them to the side of their own lives" stays in my head.

Almost all his [Rilke's] writing on art and sculpture is worth anyone's time.

Have you read the book of letters on Cezanne? That one has been calling to me lately, though I suspect I'm more interested in it as autobiography than as criticism.

The photographs in this book are excellent, but as I wanted a factual history of Rodin, the narrative was disappointing for me. I should have realised that this book was written by a poet who once worked for Rodin. As a result the text is too aesthetic for my needs.

brb, going to find Adrian Mitchell and beat him to death

with a keep calm and carry on mug

without Larkin I guess I'd never know what it felt like to be a miserable twat who moved to Hull and stuck around for whatever reason, wasting life on equal shares of administrative work, train journeys and booze.

on the other hand, you might have been miserable anyway!

I'd have been all of those things anyway! I live about 5 minutes away from Larkin's flat (the one with the "High Windows")

this sentence from Adrian Mitchell's wiki page is a little ambiguous, but I think they mean it in the good way?

In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space.[4]

Heh

HUMAN BEINGS
                look at your hands
    your beautiful useful hands
                you’re not an ape
            you’re not a parrot
    you’re not a slow loris
        or a smart missile
            you’re human
            not british
        not american
            not israeli
    not palestinian
        you’re human
            not catholic
    not protestant
        not muslim
            not hindu
    you’re human
    we all start human
        we end up human
            human first
                human last
            we’re human
        or we’re nothing
    nothing but bombs
        and poison gas
    nothing but guns
        and torturers
    nothing but slaves
    of Greed and War
    if we’re not human
                    look at your body
    with its amazing systems
    of nerve-wires and blood canals
        think about your mind
    which can think about itself
        and the whole universe
            look at your face
    which can freeze into horror
            or melt into love
        look at all that life
            all that beauty
            you’re human
        they are human
        we are human
    let’s try to be human
            dance!

grooped i implore thee, my footling turlingdromes

the last line and by extension entire poem spoken by cowboy movie heel as he fires his pistol into the dirt at some poor young lad's feet

lost me at "not an ape"

and the idea that such a speciesist poem would be used for a first contact

I cannot settle which is worse,
The Anti-Novel or Adrian Fucking Mitchell

Pshaw! Millions of people like posters of cats with modestly amusing captions, such as "Hang In There!", too. Someone must supply them with ever new and transparently cheesy gewgaws and Adrian Mitchell is just the person to do it, proudly, sincerely and without shame. Let us leave them to themselves, fondly holding hands, their mouths stained pink by cotton candy.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Great thread everyone

In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space.

Out of a cannon into the sun?

Hoos what’d you vote for

Uhh I think the second line because it leaves space for people to mean well despite forces at play that can ultimately be more powerful than they are

^vmic

Which is a good thing

Haha truly

feeling “Man hands on misery to man” at the moment. otherwise “coastal shelf” - that way it conveys a dread sense, which surrounds the heart, of an accumulation of irretrievable cold and darkness over time - rather than progress or even not-progress, the perpetuation of the human race being an act that ploughs is further into sadness as a collective being of isolated individuals, that retains and adds to our fucked upness (our solitude, our anger, our failures of tolerance and kindness etc).

this is the picture of someone awake with fear at night, assessing their own mortality and childlessness, rather than a truth, i think. or rather it sums up that feeling truly than necessarily expressing a “true” sentiment (otherwise no “Sidney Bechet” - “oh play that thing!” - or “First Sight” - “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” - that “immeasurable” a counterweight to the endless “deepening” here)

I

Look it's a very good thread and poetry and interpretation etc

But coastal shelf as a line stands out for me as the one put in

Because it rhymed with what he wanted the last line to be

i read george herbert’s poem Miserie recently and turned back to it after that post, to see whether there was any useful gloss for Larkin’s use. Not really, tho it is really good:

Man is but grass
He knows it, fill the glasse

and

Oh foolish man! where are thine eyes?
How hast thou lost them in a crowd of cares?Thou pull’st the rug, and wilt not rise,
No not to purchase the whole pack of starres

(pull’st the rug = drag the quilt over yourself in the morning)

it was in the poem above tho - Decay - that i found a sort of parallel to This Be The Verse:

I see the world grows old, when as the heat
Of thy great love once spread, as in an urn
Doth closet up it self, and still retreat,
Cold sinne still forcing it...


i’ll break off there for the moment. this is, as with larkin’s coastal shelf, progressive, irrevocable loss, coldness and decay. it progresses through history, in herbert’s case away from the starting fire of God’s love, in Larkin’s through an accumulation of corruption (from an implied point of innocence, then).

what larkin cannot have is millenarian redemption - to continue the herbert verse:

Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return,
And calling Justice, all things burn.

the apocalyptic fire renews the heat forever. for larkin there is no such moment.

what larkin calls “misery” herbert wd call sin. and it occurs to me in a way that is now obvious and will have been pointed out before that much of what larkin wrote is a reaching into godlessness from with a religious framework, of poetry, of language and of society and an inherited state of mind. there is no wheel or couplet or fire to redeem his coastal shelf.

that inherited state of mind, from which you can’t escape, which traps you in its religion even when you do not believe, is how your parents and your parents’ generation fuck you up.

xpost

yeah but sometimes the process that drives you to choose the word doesn't mean it's not the right word

Xp

i think that happy conjunction of meaning, fit and sound is why it’s good! deepens like a coastal shelf works as a stand-alone image for me ymmv / de gustibus

wot NV said. the constraints of poetry produce these moments.

Ya it's acknowledged as a personal thing

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Strong showing for the last verse, 4 of the top 5.

Also I have much love for some parents, but lol at the other line in the top five being "but not me, right, guys?"

Think the votes for "They may not mean to, but they do." was based on double-meaning, as discussed upthread

Yeah it's very much a line that can be read as apology or condemnation or just a shrug all of which came up itt

The Verse This Be

It deepens like a coastal shelf.
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Man hands on misery to man.
They may not mean to, but they do.

Get out as early as you can,
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Who half the time were soppy-stern
By fools in old-style hats and coats,

But they were fucked up in their turn
And add some extra, just for you.
They fill you with the faults they had
And half at one another’s throats.

hahah sick

Excellent

ha wrote itself rly

A good idea need only be done half-well

nice

Kudos

We should poll more poems and do the same.