Mr. Bleaney, by Poet Philip Larkin

Exploring Mr. Bleaney by Philip Larkin

Mr Bleaney
by Philip Larkin


‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits – what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways –
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.



*From "The Collected Poems" (Faber, 1993), by permission of the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd. Recording used by permission of Mr. John Weeks. Poem featured in the Poetry Archive's BBC 100 Collection.

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Poet Philip Larkin

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Mr Bleaney

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Mr Bleaney" is a poem by British poet Philip Larkin, written in May 1955. It was first published in The Listener on 8 September 1955 and later included in Larkin's 1964 anthology The Whitsun Weddings.

The speaker in the poem is renting a room and compares his situation to that of its previous occupant, a Mr Bleaney.

Larkin had previously used the surname Bleaney in his first novel Jill in 1946, where Bleaney is named as a classmate of the hero, John Kemp, at "Huddlesford Grammar School", somewhere in Lancashire. But the reader is not told his Christian name or indeed anything else about him. There is nothing to indicate that this is the same Bleaney who eventually occupies the room described in Larkin's poem.

Structure

The poem comprises seven four-line stanzas with a regular rhyme pattern of ABAB. The last sentence spans two stanzas:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.^[1]

— lines 21-28

See also

• List of poems by Philip Larkin

References

1. ^ Larkin, Philip (2004). Thwaite, Anthony (ed.). Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 81. ISBN 9780374529208.