Mr Bleaney

"Mr Bleaney" is a poem written by British poet Philip Larkin. It was written in May 1955, was first published in The Listener on 8 September 1955, and later collected in the book The Whitsun Weddings in 1964.^[1]

The poem and its eponymous character have stuck in the popular imagination. Ian Hamilton recited the poem to a friend after moving into a new flat, and the adjective Bleaneyish has entered the language.

Larkin had previously used the surname Bleaney in his first novel 'Jill' in 1946. Bleaney (we are not told his Christian name or indeed anything else about him) is named as a classmate of the hero, John Kemp, at 'Huddlesford Grammar School' in Lancashire. There is nothing to indicate that this particular Bleaney grows up to occupy the room described in Larkin's poem.

The speaker in the poem is moving into a rented room and considers the sad and somewhat squalid life of its previous tenant who happens to haunt the house, a Mr Bleaney.

Clive James — in a recorded conversation with Peter Porter — has commented "the last stanza of any Larkin poem is characteristically a bravura display of what the English sentence can do; in its syntax and in its grammar it's screwed up to the tightest possible compression of meaning and effect," and Mr Bleaney provides an excellent example of this. 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.

See also

• List of poems by Philip Larkin

References

1. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/somethingunderstood_20061231.shtml

• London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No. 2,14 January 2002, Dan Jacobson's interview with Ian Hamilton
• Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2003, Appendix III.
• Transcript of 'On the Art of Being Seriously Entertaining', fifth in a series of recorded conversations between Clive James and Peter Porter, broadcast on ABC radio Australia on 26 November 2005.

External links

• New York Times article on Larkin

The poem 'Mr Bleaney's Room (An Open Letter to Philip Larkin)' by Sheena Blackhall turns around, in retrospect, Philip Larkin's bleak assessment of his and Mr Bleaney's life. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mr-bleaney-s-room-an-open-letter-to-philip-larkin/