{"id":70460,"date":"2014-04-29T10:45:02","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T14:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70460"},"modified":"2014-04-30T12:12:06","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T16:12:06","slug":"on-epitaphic-fictions-robert-louis-stevenson-philip-larkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/29\/on-epitaphic-fictions-robert-louis-stevenson-philip-larkin\/","title":{"rendered":"On Epitaphic Fictions: Robert Louis Stevenson, Philip Larkin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second in a three-part series on writers\u2019 epitaphs. Read yesterday\u2019s installment here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Robert_Louis_Stevenson_by_Sargent\"<\/a>

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson<\/i>, 1887<\/p><\/div>\n

There is very little that\u2019s puzzling about Philip Larkin\u2019s two-penny upright \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d (1971):<\/p>\n

\n

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

\nThey may not mean to, but they do.
\nThey fill you with the faults they had
\nAnd add some extra, just for you.<\/p>\n

But they were fucked up in their turn
\nBy fools in old-style hats and coats,
\nWho half the time were soppy-stern
\nAnd half at one another\u2019s throats.<\/p>\n

Man hands on misery to man.
\nIt deepens like a coastal shelf.
\nGet out as early as you can.
\nAnd don\u2019t have any kids yourself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d is arguably the best-loved English poem of the last half of the twentieth century. Funny, frank, transgressive\u2014human\u2014the poem has stood up admirably in pub, alley, and classroom. (Of how many humans<\/em> with fancy titles can this be said?) But what about that awkward title? How did a writer as good as Larkin fuck up his forms of to be<\/em>?<\/p>\n

The title\u2019s oddness is no empty gesture. The words \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d point us toward one of the sweetest, un-Larkin-esque poems in the language, Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s self-composed epitaph. When it\u2019s published in an anthology, it usually appears as two stanzas called \u201cRequiem,\u201d but on Stevenson\u2019s tomb, the epitaph is presented as a single block under his name and dates, without punctuation or title: \"stevensongrave\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Under the wide and starry sky,
\nDig the grave and let me lie,
\nGlad did I live and gladly die,
\nAnd I laid me down with a will.<\/p>\n

This be the verse you grave for me:
\nHere he lies where he longed to be,
\nHome is the sailor, home from sea,<\/em>
\nAnd the hunter home from the hill.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cRequiem\u201d offers us several moving fictions. The principal inducer of make-believe here is the utter smoothness and rhythmic consistency of the poem. (That second \u201cthe\u201d on line seven is a plaque-maker\u2019s error.) The sounds this text makes\u2014one almost bursts into song reciting it\u2014correspond to conventional notions of what it meant to write beautiful English verse in the late-nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

But Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis, and the beauty here evinces a tubercular\u2019s desire for a calm and musical passing, his wish to skip the bits of lung hacked up in the back of the throat, the blood-spattered kerchiefs and pillowcases. The most striking fiction in the first stanza, perhaps, is the fiction that one is as glad to die as one has been to live. Line three\u2014with its mellifluous repetition of all the sounds that occur in \u201cglad did I live\u201d in the phrase \u201cgladly die\u201d\u2014doubles down on this fiction, which is backed up by the punning end of line four, where \u201cwill\u201d sounds out Stevenson\u2019s sense that these lines are his final testament, a strong-willed, perhaps even willful, presentation of his legacy. See how the word \u201cgrave,\u201d which arrives in line two as a noun, reappears, in line five, as a verb? Stevenson\u2019s epitaph transforms a hole in the ground into an active making.<\/p>\n

Stevenson\u2019s fight with tuberculosis was more retreat than attack. A Scot, born in Edinburgh, he wrote beautifully from many places in whose climates he sought relief from the symptoms of his disease: Dorset, Davos, coastal California, Hy\u00e8res, the Adirondacks, Hawaii, New Zealand. He died and was buried in Samoa, about 9460 miles from his birthplace, so Google tells me. In light of that fact, few lines pluck at one\u2019s heartstrings so strongly as the sentimental fiction, \u201cHome is the sailor, home from sea \/ And the hunter home from the hill.\u201d Even on his own tomb, Stevenson tells us the story we want to hear regarding our own eventual resting places, though he must lie so far from home.<\/p>\n

Larkin\u2019s use of Stevenson\u2019s words hides the epitaphic frame of \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d in plain sight. (I have found, on a long-disused thread, a famous poet\u2019s admission of how even she, in the days before the Internet, had for nearly a decade never bothered to look up the reference.) His use of the phrase indicates that Larkin\u2019s speaker, too, is concerned about what somebody will \u201cgrave\u201d on his headstone, which, like Ben Franklin\u2019s headstone<\/a>, is only a notion\u2014it doesn\u2019t yet exist, and won\u2019t for some time. (Larkin\u2019s actual headstone would end up bearing no epitaph.)<\/p>\n

\"Philip_Larkin_-headstone_at_Cottingham_municipal_cemetery,_near_Hull,_England-24May2008<\/a>

Photo: Keith D, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>The fictions in Stevenson\u2019s \u201cRequiem\u201d are generous, if sentimental. Are the fictions of \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d as generous? I think so. Their generosity derives in part from Larkin\u2019s inversion of Stevenson\u2019s sentimentality, and in part from his dipping the speaker\u2019s instructions in irony. Larkin tacitly invites us to imagine coming upon \u201cThey fuck you up, your mum and dad\u201d on a headstone, under anybody\u2019s name, two dates, and a hyphen. (The hyphen is itself a moving figure, so compact is the rectangular mark that stands for a life.) Our laughter at \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d expresses our surprise at finding such inappropriate diction carved in a so upright a font, and taking so stern a posture.<\/p>\n

Larkin\u2019s poem places his speaker in a continuous series of generations, each human member of which may live for only a hyphen\u2019s length\u2014but that\u2019s long enough to realize that human misery is general, that our discrete pain and suffering is part of something greater. The command that follows the only vivid image in the poem\u2014misery deepening \u201clike a coastal shelf\u201d\u2014is a non sequitur. \u201cGet out as early as you can.\u201d We can hardly follow it any more than we could follow Yeats\u2019s imperative<\/a>, \u201cHorseman, pass by.\u201d Misery loves company, but in our experience of \u201cThis Be the Verse,\u201d the misery is only fiction. The laughter we share when we read Larkin\u2019s imagined epitaph is real.<\/p>\n

Daniel Bosch is Senior Editor at <\/em>Berfrois<\/a>. His sonnet sequence \u201cTo a Barista\u201d is at <\/em>The Common<\/a>; his meditation on race and invocation will appear later this week at <\/em>The Morning News<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second in a three-part series on writers\u2019 epitaphs. Read yesterday\u2019s installment here. There is very little that\u2019s puzzling about Philip Larkin\u2019s two-penny upright \u201cThis Be the Verse\u201d (1971): 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":686,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2186,13706,7523,13705,13707,2253,165,3419,13704],"class_list":["post-70460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-death","tag-epitaphs","tag-graves","tag-gravestones","tag-headstones","tag-philip-larkin","tag-poetry","tag-robert-louis-stevenson","tag-tombstones"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEpitaphic Fictions of Robert Louis Stevenson & Philip Larkin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The second in a three-part series on writers\u2019 epitaphs.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/29\/on-epitaphic-fictions-robert-louis-stevenson-philip-larkin\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Epitaphic Fictions: Robert Louis Stevenson, Philip Larkin by Daniel Bosch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 29, 2014 \u2013 The second in a three-part series on writers\u2019 epitaphs. 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