This Be The Verse By Kelly J Mays

The Norton Introduction to Literature (shorter 14th edition), written by Kelly J. Mays includes the poem, “This Be the Verse”, written by Phillip Larkin which portrays the psychological damage inflicted onto impressionable children by their parents. Larkin’s poem uses strategically placed pauses, language, and simile, as well as variations in meter to portray the speaker's enraged thoughts toward the generational emotional struggle, caused by caretakers, that ruin the innocence of children.

Within each stanza, pauses are used to create drama to show the speaker’s seriousness about the internal pain inflicted by parents. The first stanza contains four lines, with three sentences, slowing the reader down to highlight the seriousness of the speaker’s

Larkin’s choice of language communicates common speech, rather than formal writing. By making the poem sound like a verbal conversation, it connects the speaker and reader together to easily portray the poem's depth of pain and anger. Obscenity throughout the stanzas brings the resentment to light that has resulted from the generational passing of emotional struggle. The use of “fuck” to express frustration implies that teachings from “soppy-stern” ancestors to productively convey emotion were not passed down (line 7). Further revealing that only negative habits were inherited by younger generations. The simile, “misery…/[is] like a coastal shelf” compares suffering to a steep drop-off that leads into an abyss. A coastal shelf is a natural occurrence in nature that is caused by continuous erosion from the flow of water and has been a part of the ocean for a long time. Comparing misery to the shelf implies that it is continuously growing and everlasting. The shelf symbolizes the effect that every upsetting moment takes a little piece of children’s happiness that eventually will build up to a gaping hole inside

The harmonizing manner softens the intensity of the allegation to engage the reader. The second stanza uses trochaic feet to show a change in perspective from viewing the present to the past. While explaining the parents' childhood, trochaic feet disrupt the rhythm and bring attention to the pattern of intergenerational bad parenting (line 5). This change leads the reader to identify that the emotional struggles weren’t exclusively passed down from their parents, but their grandparents as well. Stanza three, line nine, uses a sporadic foot to bring intensity to the fact that “Man hands on misery to man” (line 9). Emphasizing “Man hands” explains how seemingly easy and universal it is to pass on emotional struggle to one another (line 9). Another variation in meter is the use of a pyrrhic foot in line 10, which eliminates the upbeat rhythm and changes it to a quiet and heavy sadness to explain how misery “…deepens like a coastal shelf.” This change amplifies the speaker’s felt sorrow. A drastic tone change occurs when sporadic feet are used when telling readers to “Get out” of the relationships causing one’s sorrow “as early as you can,” (line 11). The foot serves to intensify the warning to the reader to be the change the world needs. “… [D]on’t have any kids yourself”, is the final line of the poem with “yourself” being a trochaic foot