This Be the Verse

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and a tetrameter line comprises four poetic feet. Thus, Line 1 scans as follows: “They fuck | you up, | your mum | and dad.” Line 4 presents another example: “And add | some ex | tra, just | for you.”

Larkin makes a number of substitutions in this iambic rhythm. In Line 9, for example, the first foot is a spondee, which comprises two stressed syllables: “Man hands.” The same applies to the first foot in Line 11: “Get out.” In both cases, the spondees add emphasis to the speaker's argument in the final verse of the poem. The two end-stopped lines at the beginning of the third verse, which slow the poem down (especially when it is read out loud), also add weight and emphasis to the speaker's final point: “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf” (Lines 9-10). (End-stopped means that the end of the line coincides with the completion of a grammatical unit—a thought or a phrase. Such a line ends with a punctuation mark, in this case a period.)

Also, the use of a caesura three times in Stanza 1 provides some variety in the rhythm, making it sound more like informal speech.