Philip Larkin's "Born Yesterday" is a poem on the paradoxically unusual theme of ordinariness. It begins by addressing the newborn baby as a "Tightly-folded bud," a metaphor which suggests that she will blossom into a flower, and remarking that everyone will be wishing her great beauty and other extraordinary gifts. He will not do this, though he says she will be a lucky girl if these extravagant hopes for her future come true. If they do not, however, let her be an ordinary woman, neither ugly nor beautiful, with "An average of talents." There should be in her composition:

Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.

She should, in other words, be a well-regulated human being with none of the wild eccentricities of genius or the manic highs and lows of brilliance or beauty. She should be dull, if dullness is the secret of happiness. In describing the "Catching of happiness," Larkin uses five adjectives in a row: skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasized, enthralled. This shows how difficult and exacting it is to be what the world calls dull and therefore happy.

The short, simple declarative trimeter lines betray no doubt about the idea that mediocrity is the secret of happiness. Only the string of adjectives at the end of the poem gives a clear sense that being dull is better than it sounds, since life itself is valuable without being exceptional or extraordinary by the standards of other lives.

It is a tragic footnote that Larkin's hopes for Sally Amis, the baby in the poem, were not realized. She came from an exceptional family, the daughter of one of the most renowned novelists of the twentieth century and the sister of another. It was not her lot in life to be tranquil and ordinary. After struggling with alcoholism and bipolar disorder, she died at the age of forty-six in the year 2000.