The Cyclical Nature of Life

One of the main themes of “This Be The Verse” is the cyclical nature of life. Your parents “fuck you up” (1) because “they were fucked up in their turn” (5), and presumably this cycle includes your grandparents and great-grandparents and so on. The essence of life can be summed up by the opening of the third quatrain, “Man hands on misery to man” (9). In other words, life is a cycle of misery.

The poem itself embodies this cyclic nature. Each quatrain features moments of repetition, both in diction and consonance. Using anaphora, Larkin repeats the pronoun “They” at the beginning of the first three lines, and he also uses a repetitive construction at the end of the first quatrain with “They fill you with the faults they had, / And add some extra, just for you” (3-4). A similarly repetitive construction occurs at the...