"Mr Bleaney" is a poem written by British poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

. 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

The Whitsun Weddings (book)

The Whitsun Weddings is a collection of 32 poems by Philip Larkin. It was first published by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom on 28 February 1964. It was a commercial success, by the standards of poetry publication, with the first 4,000 copies being sold within two months. A U.S...

in 1964.

The poem and its eponymous character have stuck in the popular imagination. Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton (critic)

Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher....

 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

Clive James

Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...

 — in a recorded conversation with Peter Porter

Peter Porter (poet)

Peter Neville Frederick Porter, OAM was a British-based Australian poet.-Life:Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He attended the Church of England Grammar School and left school at 18, and went to work as a trainee journalist...

— 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.

External links

• New York Times article on Larkin