The Perseverance — Raymond Antrobus
The poem The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus takes its title from a real pub near the poet’s childhood home — but the word also becomes a way of describing his own life. Growing up hard of hearing and mixed race, and watching a father he loved struggle with alcohol, Antrobus asks what it means to keep loving someone difficult, and whether patience is its own kind of understanding.
Antrobus was born in Hackney in 1986. His deafness was not diagnosed until he was six years old, and before that doctors mistakenly believed he had learning difficulties. Both experiences — being deaf and being of mixed Jamaican and English heritage — run through his poetry, alongside his complicated love for his father. The Perseverance also gave its name to Antrobus’s 2018 debut collection, which won and was shortlisted for major poetry prizes and was named on several books-of-the-year lists. As a performance poet, Antrobus has appeared alongside poets including Warsan Shire and Kae Tempest.
The title works two ways at once: it names the real pub where the poet’s father drank, and it names the quality — perseverance — that relationships need to survive real difficulty. Loving a parent who struggles with addiction, Antrobus suggests, takes exactly this kind of endurance.
The poem shows a boy’s home life shaped by his father’s fondness for the pub, a fondness the poem returns to more than once through repetition. Despite the difficulty this causes, the father still “serves” his son a heritage — an inheritance of Caribbean identity and history, passed down even through a strained relationship. The verb suggests something being offered or dished out, as if love and heritage arrive mixed together with hardship.
The poem’s epigraph introduces a “man overstanding” — a phrase built on overstanding, a Rastafarian term meaning to go beyond ordinary understanding and reach “having the big picture,” with connotations of strength, positivity and respect. It is left deliberately ambiguous whether this man is the father, whose flawed wisdom the poem forgives, or the poet himself, who has grown to overstand his father only through years of perseverance.
The word “perseverance” appears inside the poem itself in lowercase, not as a grand or heroic title but as an ordinary, everyday quality — something practised quietly, again and again, rather than announced.
Antrobus builds this ambiguity into the poem’s form. The poem shifts noticeably between its second and third stanzas, moving away from steady description towards something less certain, as if the relationship itself resists a tidy resolution. Line two uses italics, setting apart a different voice — perhaps the father’s own words — from the poet’s surrounding narration. Antrobus also uses a parking-meter simile: handed 50p to make him disappear while his father drinks, the boy imagines himself vanishing like a coin dropped into a parking meter before the time runs out — a simile of the child's own erasure and of the minutes lost waiting outside. Across the poem, certain words return in its rhymes and patterns, and this repetition mirrors the very idea of perseverance: persistence built by returning to the same effort again and again.
The poem’s penultimate line is deliberately open to more than one meaning, leaving readers to decide for themselves what kind of “overstanding” has actually been reached, and by whom. This refusal to resolve neatly reflects real relationships with a difficult parent, where forgiveness and love rarely arrive in one clean, completed moment.
The shift in tense and perspective around the third stanza also unsettles the reader’s sense of when events are happening — is the poet remembering childhood, or reflecting from the present? This uncertainty is not a flaw but part of the poem’s method: perseverance, the poem suggests, is felt in the enduring and the revisiting, not in a single completed action.
Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy also explores waiting: the maid waits all day for evening, just as Antrobus’s poem is built around waiting on a father’s return from the pub. Comparing the two would draw out how each poet uses repeated routine to show devotion under strain.
Dusting the Phone by Jackie Kay shows a speaker gripped by anxious impatience for a phone call, which contrasts sharply with the slower, longer perseverance Antrobus practises with his father. A comparison could explore how pacing and tense capture two very different rhythms of waiting.
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath explores the bond between a parent and a new baby, offering a useful comparison point for how The Perseverance looks back at a parent-child bond built up over years, rather than at its very beginning.
Love After Love by Derek Walcott traces a relationship with the self after damage and separation, which pairs well with Antrobus’s poem about persevering with a fractured but loved family relationship — both poems ask what remains after difficulty, and how it can be lived with.
These pairings will never appear as a two-poem question on the exam paper — the printed comparison always pairs The Perseverance, or whichever anthology poem is set, with an unseen poem. But knowing these connections sharpens the comparison skill the exam actually tests: spotting shared ideas, noticing different tones, and comparing methods with confidence.
If The Perseverance is printed alongside an unseen poem, look for shared ideas about patience, family or flawed love, and compare each poet’s tone towards the person being waited for or forgiven. If it becomes the poem explored alone, the most useful short quotations to have ready are “man overstanding,” “overstanding” itself, “serves,” and “perseverance” — each opens a discussion of the father, the heritage passed down, or the quiet, everyday nature of patient love.