What is Philip Larkin trying to say in his poem "This Be the Verse"?I'm guessing the meaning of the poem is what made the poem so famous, but I...

"This Be the Verse" is a blunt, in-your-face send up of
parenthood.  It's British colloquial ("mum") and modern vulgar ("They f*@# you up") in
its conversational voice spoken by a swaggering male persona who seems to have a pint in
one hand and a pen in the other.

But, there's depth in the
poem.  It reminds me of the Greek tragedy Oedipus, whose parents,
as you know, really f-ed him up by crippling him and leaving him for dead.  His fate
were those broken ankles that he hobbled on all the days of his
life.

Larkin, like Sophocles with
Oedipus, knows that the only fate is not controlled by the gods, or
oracles, or curses, but simply by blood, genetics, and "mum" and
"dad."

He's saying your parents curse you like they were
cursed.  Your vices were their vices.  Your suffering, theirs.  They went through it
with their parents, the Victorians in their "hats."  And your kids will go through it
with you: it's inevitable.  You end up just like your parents, even though your try to
escape it.  And you raise your children the same way you were raised.  It's generational
revenge: torturing of one generation by the next, out of
spite.

He's saying if you want to stop the cycle, then stop
having kids.  It's not a moratorium on parenthood so much as a wake up call for kids to
realize this before they become parents.  He wants his audience not to pass on the
suffering, but learn from it.  Trace it back.  Share it.  Get those skeletons out of the
closets.  Stop repeating stubborn age-old mistakes.

In the
last stanza, he wants his readers to be like little
geologists:

Man hands on misery to man. / It
deepens like a coastal shelf.

Family tragedy is
buried in the blood, in experience, like fossils in the geological layers.  Like
Oedipus, we must suffer to know it and stop it--not by not having kids, but by not
crippling them at birth.