2.2

for someone who, for the most part of his life, worked as a librarian, philip larkin certainly had an eventful life, with as many as three alleged relationships with different women simultaneously in the early seventies. a british poet, his poetry was plain in its usage of colloquial language and pessimism, death, fatalism featured as an underlying motif in his body of work. i first read this poem when i was 19, it featured in an anthology i picked up at the british council library.

This Be The Verse
They fuck 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 fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

-Philip Larkin