Mr Bleaney
Uploaded by kayesh25 on May 19, 2007
In my essay I will review and talk about two poems form Phillip Larkin’s collection of which he wrote. I will firstly talk about “Mr Bleaney” this is one of Larkin’s most popular poems. The main theme to this poem expresses loneliness and the shallowness of human life. This poem is more like a play because it tells a story that is full of a lucid mystery. There are two distinct scenes in the poem, in the first, which occupies the first three stanzas, of this seven-stanza poem. The poem is presented with a landlady showing her perspective of the lodger whose room has been empty since he left, the mysterious Mr Bleaney. “This was Mr Bleaney’s room” the opens out straight away with a mystery we are not told why he departed. Larkin uses the world “Bodies” would seem to suggest the undertaker but not rightly so, it was a term used by the workers in the jaguar factory in Coventry. “Whose window shows a strip of building land, tussocky, littered” Larkin provides a description of the life of Mr Bleaney as one of worthlessness, this is particularly noticeable in the use of good language such as ‘tussocky, “littered’ and ‘upright”. “Behind the door, no room for books or bags” Mr Bleaney was not a wealthy man and had not a lot of possessions. Larkin wrote “On the same saucer-souvenir, and try” this phrase represents Queen Victoria’s coronation. “The jabbering set he egged her on to buy” the landlady has come to know Mr Bleaney’s habits (“His preference for sauce to gravy”) and has encouraged the landlady to buy a radio, this is used to stress, the landlady’s constant jabbering about her former lodger. “Stuffing my ears with cotton- wool” the lodger stuffs his ears with cotton wool because he does not want to here any more about Mr Bleaney.