Stanza 1

In this short lyric poem, the unnamed speaker (presumably a stand-in for Philip Larkin himself) adopts a colloquial, direct, but also philosophical tone that is intended to amuse as well as express a truth about human nature. The poem uses three stanzas of four-line iambic tetrameter and an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme to create a lilting but fast-paced rhythm. In the first stanza, rhyming one-syllable words like “do / you” and “dad / had” establishes a casual, accessible register, and the end-stopped lines signal a straightforward syntax that allow the reader to pause and think about each line before proceeding to the next.

The speaker uses the phrase “they fuck you up” in Line 1 to describe how parents negatively influence their children’s lives. The irreverent word choice is designed to get the reader’s attention and indicates that the speaker will not sugarcoat what he has to say. The poem is written as both a direct address to “you,” the reader, and as a general statement about the nature of families. The speaker is not angry or bitter, and there is affection discernible in his use of the informal terms like “mum and dad” (Line 1) rather than father and mother (“mum” is the preferred spelling in England of the American “mom”).