‘I love you. I’m glad I exist’: How The Orange made Wendy Cope the internet’s favourite poet

Wendy Cope likes a quiet life, was desperate not to be Poet Laureate and once crossly condemned the spread of her work online. Now, at 78, her droll, unpretentious verse and clear-eyed understanding of mental health has brought her late viral fame, writes Jessie Thompson, with her poem ‘The Orange’ inspiring TikTok tributes and tattoos

Wendy Cope’s poem ‘The Orange’ has brought her work to a whole new generation (Lydia Evans)

In Wendy Cope’s poem “The Orange”, she buys herself… a very big orange. One so huge that she laughs at it, then shares it with her friends (Robert and Dave). Next, she thinks about how, recently, “ordinary things” have made her happy – “the shopping”, or “a walk in the park”. Then, she completes “all the jobs on my list” (even with time to spare). But it’s the poem’s final line – simple, yet seemingly hard won – that knocks you sideways: “I love you. I’m glad I exist.”

“The Orange” is a quiet hymn not just to savouring small pleasures, but finally feeling at peace in your own skin. First published in 1992 as part of her second collection, Serious Concerns, it’s undoubtedly one of Cope’s best – typical of her economical, unpretentious style, and the vast emotional undercurrent that lurks beneath her poetry like an iceberg. And now, three decades on, an entire new generation of fans have fallen for this unfussy love letter to life’s everyday joys. As such, Faber & Faber are publishing a dainty new edition, The Orange and other poems (complete with cheer-inducing cover illustration); an accompanying “I love you. I’m glad I exist” pin badge is already sold out on the publisher’s website.

Born in Kent in 1945, Cope spent 14 years working as a primary school teacher before her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, full of sharp parodies of the “great” male scribes, established her as a drily witty poet of the people almost overnight. Today, head to TikTok and you will find hundreds of posts where “The Orange” – recited by a man with a soothing Irish voice – is the soundtrack to appreciating the present. People post compilations of simple but divine moments in their days: cuddling their dogs, playing the piano, watching bees land on lavender, standing by calm running streams, hula hooping, or even just reading a book.

“The inherent romanticism of sharing ur orange slices with others,” says one fan. “I wana get to the point where these things make me happy,” poignantly reads another. “I need an orange tattoo,” says one, while in several other posts, people actually do get orange tattoos. The poem seems to provide infinite room for the stories of those emerging from darkness, like one post in which a woman explains how, finding herself smiling after years of sadness, she finally understands why the final line is not “I’m glad you exist”, but I.

Like many of Cope’s best poems, “The Orange” seems ordinary, unremarkable even, but gently swells in emotional power and meaning as it unfurls. The final tasting notes don’t really arrive until the poem is over, lingering disarmingly on the reader’s palate. Here, it is one of astonishment: it is worth being alive after all. In others, that note can be acidic. Take “I Worry”, which appears to be a lament for a lonely man, before it flicks into something meaner. Or “Tich Miller”, a ballad to a school misfit who, we learn in the final line, never grew up (“Tich died when she was twelve”).

What may appeal to younger readers about Cope’s verse, aside from its accessible, welcoming style, is its keen awareness of mental health. Although some have dismissed Cope as a cosy poet of light comic verse – she’s spoken previously about how the poetry establishment’s snobbery has hurt her – you don’t need to read much of it to find the darkness lurking at its heart. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2019, she chose “Blackbird” by The Beatles, explaining that the lyric “you were only waiting for this moment to arise” seemed to be speaking to her directly as she emerged from a severe depression.

The illness had lasted until her late twenties, before she began psychoanalysis, and writing poetry became a way of “getting in touch with feelings I need to express”. There’s a wry black humour to her poem “Some More Light Verse”, in which she writes: “You have to try. You see a shrink. / You learn a lot. You read. You think.” Before long comes despair: “You take up yoga, walk and swim. / And nothing works. The outlook’s grim. / You don’t know what to do. You cry. / You’re running out of things to try.” (The final, resilient line is a repeat of the first: “You have to try.”) In a 2001 edition of Radio Four’s Book Club, she revealed she had been feeling suicidal when she first started writing the poem.

The new edition of Wendy Cope’s work, published this week (Faber & Faber)

That’s why those four plain words – “I’m glad I exist” – have the power they do. They are the unexpected reward of having survived something. To mark the publication of Faber & Faber’s new edition, Cope revealed that she had begun writing “The Orange” at the start of a new relationship, one that would only last for another year. (She also said that she’s still friends with Dave – but Robert died in 2014.) Does it matter that the love she declares in the poem didn’t last? I don’t think so – the poem reminds us that these moments of contentment can be fleeting, but feeling well enough to recognise them is what one really hopes will last.

I saw someone online describe Cope as “the cynical queen of my heart”; I’m intrigued as to what the notably private poet makes of her viral fame. When she was considered the public’s favoured successor as Poet Laureate, first to Ted Hughes and then to Andrew Motion, she said “the whole episode made me pretty anxious”. Why? Perhaps because, as she later said, she prefers “a quiet life”. After all, another classic Cope poem is “Being Boring”, in which she ignores parties in favour of doing the gardening and her “one ambition in life… to go on and on being boring”.

In fact, my favourite moment in her episode of Desert Island Discs is when she chooses the theme song to ITV crime drama Unforgotten as one of her tracks. She and her husband, fellow poet Lachlan Mackinnon, liked watching the show together, she said. One day, he came home with the CD: “He said, I’ve got something for you. Listen to track 11. And it was this song. And that was such a nice thing to do.” The anecdote – the magic that presides in an unfussy moment of thoughtfulness – could itself be a Cope poem. She married Mackinnon a decade ago, after they had been together for 19 years, but admitted in The Guardian she had wanted a civil partnership: “you can just sign a document: no need to have a ceremony or any fuss or expense”. (In the end, she adds, it was a nice day – they drank champagne from Tesco and she cried saying her vows.)

Another intriguing aspect of Cope becoming the internet’s favourite poet is that, in 2007, she wrote an article headlined “You like my poems? So pay for them”. Frustrated at seeing her work shared online without her knowledge, she condemned the blase attitude to permission fees and book royalties that poets are so reliant upon. Of course, you might argue that the fact her poems have been learned by heart by so many readers is more valuable than money – but neither does that pay the bills. Cope drolly joked that her gravestone should read “Wendy Cope. All Rights Reserved.”

In the end, perhaps it’s all come full circle anyway. With the publication of The Orange and other poems, Cope’s viral fame has resulted in her work being offered anew in a nice, neat package, in an age when people value buying books and holding them in their hands. Let us all go offline to enjoy her work; let “The Orange” be the Wendy Cope gateway fruit for more readers who, like me, will soon say: We love her. We’re glad she exists.

‘The Orange and other poems’ is out now, published by Faber & Faber