Parenting & Family Quote by Philip Larkin

Larkin doesn’t dress up despair as wisdom; he files it down to a clean edge and makes you hold it. The first line lands like an aphorism you’d find carved into a pub table: blunt, unromantic, almost annoyed at the need to say it. “Man hands on misery to man” turns suffering into inheritance, not fate. Misery isn’t a random storm; it’s a family practice, passed along with habits, silences, and expectations.

Then comes the quietly vicious simile: “It deepens like a coastal shelf.” A coastal shelf looks gradual, even safe, until it drops. Larkin’s point isn’t that life is always catastrophic; it’s that damage accumulates with a calm, geological inevitability. The line also smuggles in England itself - coastline, erosion, the slow work of time - giving the pessimism a local weathered texture rather than cosmic melodrama.

“Get out as early as you can” sounds like a joke until you feel how literal it is. The final clause, “and don’t have any kids yourself,” is where the speaker’s cynicism spikes into moral injunction. It’s not just self-protection; it’s an attempt to break a chain by refusing to forge the next link. Written in the postwar shadow and Larkin’s own skeptical temperament, the poem rejects the comforting storyline that parenthood redeems suffering. It’s a brutal anti-sentimental ethics: if pain is transmissible, abstention starts to look like responsibility.