The Full Text of “Mr Bleaney”
The Full Text of “Mr Bleaney”
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“Mr Bleaney” Introduction
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Written in 1955 and published in the 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin's "Mr Bleaney" deals with loneliness, deprivation, and the fear of wasting one's life. The speaker rents a dingy room and learns that the previous tenant, Mr. Bleaney, lived there for many years, seemingly trapped in a solitary, dull existence. Having taken Bleaney's place, the speaker worries that he'll meet the same fate—and that the mediocre living conditions he's settled for reflect his own Bleaney-like mediocrity. Ultimately, the poem plays with the idea that "how we live measures our own nature": that we end up with the home and life we deserve, even if it's not much of a home or life.
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“Mr Bleaney” Summary
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A landlady tells the speaker that the room he's considering renting was formerly occupied by a man named Mr. Bleaney. Bleaney lived there the whole time he worked at a car manufacturing plant known as "the Bodies," until he died or was transferred. The room's thin, shabby, floral-patterned curtains hang five inches short of the windowsill.
The window shows a small yard full of grass clumps and litter. The landlady mentions her "garden" and claims that Bleaney improved it. The room contains a bed, a straight-backed chair, a weak lightbulb, no hook attached to the door, and no space for personal items such as books and luggage.
The speaker tells the landlady he'll rent it. The speaker now lies in the same bed Bleaney once lay in, crushes his cigarette butts in the same tacky saucer Bleaney once used, and plugs his ears with cotton to muffle the radio Bleaney once urged the landlady to buy.
He's learned all of Bleaney's old habits, such as what time he came downstairs each day, how he liked sauce better than gravy, and why he kept betting on soccer.
He's also learned about the yearly schedule that shaped those habits, such as the summer vacations Bleaney spent with acquaintances in Frinton-on-Sea and the Christmases he spent at his sister's house in Stoke-on-Trent.
The speaker wonders whether Bleaney stood looking out at cold, cloudy weather; lay on the musty bed, pretending this room was an acceptable home; and smiled while shivering.
At the same time, the speaker wonders if Bleaney felt a persistent fear that our living conditions reflect who we truly are, and that for someone as old as he was, having nothing more than a tiny rented room meant that was all he'd earned in life. The speaker says that these are things he doesn't know for sure about Bleaney.
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“Mr Bleaney” Themes
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The Dangers of Mediocrity
“Mr Bleaney” sketches a sad portrait of the tenant who formerly occupied the speaker’s rented room. The tenant, Mr. Bleaney, led a dull, solitary life, lacking in spontaneity, intimacy, and ambition. The drab, confined room where he lived and died seems to reflect his personal qualities, as if his ghost still lingers. Seeing these qualities as a judgment on Bleaney’s character, the speaker also judges himself: he has literally taken Bleaney’s place, and fears that he, too, will live an empty life in this coffin-like room. The poem warns that it’s all too easy for a dreary, mediocre existence to develop its own momentum, trapping people in gloomy circumstances forever.
The speaker’s portrait of Bleaney suggests that he feels both distaste and a queasy pity for his small, sad life. Bleaney’s drab bedroom, without so much as a “hook” on the door for clothes, speaks of a life empty of vitality and meaning. The landlady’s stories about him suggest much the same: he appears to have been a creature of habit, committed to a dull routine. He seems to have had no curiosity beyond listening to the “jabbering set” (a radio or TV), no aspirations beyond gambling, and no intimate contacts besides a sister he saw once a year. And his efforts to leave a mark on the world didn’t come to much: the “bit of garden” he once tended, for instance, is a mess now.
But what really makes the speaker uncomfortable is the fact that he himself seems to be following in Bleaney’s footsteps. While the speaker can clearly see how empty and constrained Bleaney’s life was, he also finds himself accepting exactly those same circumstances. After assessing Bleaney’s grim little room, the speaker says, “I’ll take it,” as if resigning himself to “taking on” Bleaney’s reality.
Worse still, he seems almost to be living Bleaney’s life! He “lie[s] / Where Mr Bleaney lay”—literally and figuratively occupying Bleaney’s position—and idly smokes as if burning away his time and health. His claim that he “know[s Bleaney's] habits” suggests that he has learned all about Bleaney’s routine from the landlady; he’s gained an uncomfortably detailed understanding of the man whose place he’s taken. And all of this is deeply unsettling to the speaker: his remark that, “at his age,” Bleaney had “no more to show” than this sad, cramped room suggests an awareness that Bleaney’s circumstances would be a terrible thing to accept in the long term.
Knowing what a life like Bleaney’s comes to, the speaker feels deeply afraid that he’ll never make anything more of himself than Bleaney did—a fear that might become its own kind of trap. Lying in the bed where Bleaney once lay, the speaker wonders whether Bleaney felt the same “dread” that he does about the prospect of spending life alone in this room—an ominous thought! If Bleaney shared some of that dread, these reflections imply, then even understanding that one is living a mediocre life can’t save one from such a life.
The speaker seems to feel Bleaney’s fate as a judgement, too. Worrying that “how we live measures our own nature,” the speaker fears that an empty life suggests an empty character—and that he might easily discover that he’s as hollow a person as Bleaney seems to have been. Perhaps, the poem implies, that sense of hollow worthlessness is part of what traps people in empty lives. If you believe that your circumstances are a reflection of your character, gloomy circumstances can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, discouraging you from trying to escape.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mr Bleaney”
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Lines 1-3
‘This was Mr ...
... They moved him.’The poem's opening lines are literally dramatic: quoting the speaker's landlady, they plunge the reader straight into a miniature drama, complete with characters, dialogue, setting, and exposition. There's something ironic about this theatrical beginning. As the poem goes on, it will focus on how undramatic the setting here is—how little happens.
The person quoted is a landlady, who's showing the speaker a room that she's renting out and telling him about the previous tenant. Evidently, she got to know that tenant fairly well over the years—but the two probably weren't that close, as she still refers to him by the formal "Mr Bleaney."
There's something faintly comic about this name. It echoes homely words like "beans" and "bleary"; shares its initial /bl/ sound with words that connote banality, like "bland" and "blah"; and rhymes with colloquial words for smallness, such as "teeny." Bleaney already sounds like an average, forgettable old chap.
Bleaney rented this room (likely part of a bedsit or cheap boarding house) "the whole time he was at the Bodies"—a term that the poem doesn't explain, but that clearly refers to his workplace. (Larkin once suggested that "the Bodies" was an auto works; there was also a taxi manufacturer called Carbodies in his hometown of Coventry.) But the nickname "Bodies" inescapably calls to mind human bodies, like the depersonalized bodies of workers at a grueling job. It also calls to mind dead bodies, especially in the context of the rest of the landlady's sentence:
[...] He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ [...]"They moved him" could mean that his employer transferred him elsewhere, but it could also be a euphemism implying that Bleaney died and was carried out of the room. (Remember that the landlady is trying to rent the room; she might not want to drive the speaker away by mentioning death outright.) Either way, her remark invites thoughts of death and makes the room seem a little haunted.
Both of the first two lines are enjambed. The enjambment after line 1 emphasizes the word "stayed" and makes it linger—stay—in the reader's mind for a moment. Until the sentence continues, it reads simply "He stayed." In a way, that simple phrase seems true of Bleaney: his ghostly presence seems to linger in the room.
The enjambment after line 2 creates a pause after "till." If the landlady is hinting that Bleaney died here, the pause might reflect her awkwardness as she decides how to share this fact.
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Lines 3-8
Flowered curtains, thin ...
... bulb, no hook -
Lines 8-10
Bed, upright chair, ...
... ‘I’ll take it.’ -
Lines 10-14
So it happens ...
... on to buy. -
Lines 15-17
I know his ...
... four aways — -
Lines 18-20
Likewise their yearly ...
... house in Stoke. -
Lines 21-24
But if he ...
... off the dread -
Lines 25-28
That how we ...
... I don’t know.
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“Mr Bleaney” Symbols
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Garden
Gardens are symbolically associated with cultivation, growth, vitality, and life itself. Idioms such as "tend one's own garden," "cultivate oneself," and "reap what you sow" link gardening and planting with the life or fate one shapes for oneself. Gardens can also be associated with paradise, as in the biblical Garden of Eden.
In this poem, the landlady claims that "Mr Bleaney took / My bit of garden properly in hand"—that is, helped her improve her garden. But there's no indication of anything beautiful growing outside her house. The window shows only a pitiful "strip of building land," both "Tussocky" (full of grass clumps) and "littered" (strewn with trash or debris). Either the garden consists of an ugly lot outside an ugly room (ironically, pretty much the opposite of a paradise), or it's just a small corner of that ugly lot.
Thus, Mr. Bleaney's garden comes to symbolize mediocrity, failure, and wasted potential—a life that never really amounts to much.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 5-7: “Whose window shows a strip of building land, / Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took / My bit of garden properly in hand.’”
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Bed
Much like "You reap what you sow," the idiom "You've made your bed; now lie in it" refers to living with the consequences of your choices. The poem plays on this symbolic link between one's bed and one's fate.
The speaker's lying down in Mr. Bleaney's "fusty" old bed, after deciding to rent Bleaney's old room, unsettlingly suggests that he's chosen a fate similar to Bleaney's—in fact, practically taken over Bleaney's mediocre life. The idea that Bleaney might have lain there "Telling himself that this was home" makes it seem that he outwardly reconciled himself to his sad fate—and that he was, on some level, fooling himself.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 10-11: “So it happens that I lie / Where Mr Bleaney lay”
- Lines 22-23: “lay on the fusty bed / Telling himself that this was home”
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“Mr Bleaney” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Irony
Larkin's poems are often laced with irony, and "Mr Bleaney" is no exception: a series of ironic moments give the poem its dark humor.
For example, in lines 5-7, this juxtaposition of image and dialogue is jarringly ironic:
[...] Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’Maybe the landlady is kidding herself; maybe her garden is dead now that Mr. Bleaney isn't there to take care of it; maybe her garden is dwarfed by the rest of the ugly view. Regardless, as the speaker looks out at grass clumps and litter, the landlady's praise of the view contradicts the reader's expectations. (If anything, you'd expect her to make an excuse for it, or not mention it at all.)
Lines 7-9 contain a bit of situational irony:
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
‘I’ll take it.’After the speaker has listed all the unattractive features of the room, he does what you'd least expect: rents the place anyway.
There's also a touch of dramatic irony in the detail about Bleaney's gambling habit ("He kept on plugging at the four aways"). Bleaney's bets couldn't have paid off much: he clearly never won enough to escape this awful housing! Along with the speaker, the reader knows that Bleaney's hopes for a lucky break were in vain.
Finally, the idea of Bleaney "Telling himself that this was home" carries an ironic charge. The reader understands that, if Bleaney really did tell himself this, he was sadly mistaken (at least from the speaker's perspective)—and in the speaker's imagination, he felt "dread" even as he told himself this. This lonely, bare space isn't a "home" in any true sense of the word.
Where irony appears in the poem:- Lines 5-7: “Whose window shows a strip of building land, / Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took / My bit of garden properly in hand.’”
- Lines 8-10: “Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook / Behind the door, no room for books or bags — / ‘I’ll take it.’”
- Line 23: “Telling himself that this was home”
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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Aporia
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"Mr Bleaney" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Bodies
- Tussocky
- Fags
- Saucer-souvenir
- Set
- Four aways
- Frinton/Stoke
- Tousling
- Fusty
- Hired
- Warranted
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “The whole time he was at the Bodies”)
"The Bodies" appears to be a nickname for Mr. Bleaney's workplace. It may relate to auto bodies, as in the Carbodies manufacturing plant in Larkin's hometown of Coventry, England. (Mentioned just before a reference to Bleaney's death, the name also evokes dead bodies.)
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mr Bleaney”
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Form
"Mr Bleaney" consists of seven quatrains, or four-line stanzas, laid out with a kind of measured regularity that mirrors the regularity of Bleaney's—and the speaker's—routine. Its four-line stanzas impose tight formal constraints, like the four walls of a confining room. (In fact, the word "stanza" derives from the Italian for "room," so Larkin may be playing on this connection.) The poem unfolds within strict limits, much like Bleaney's and the speaker's lives.
At the same time, the poem's occasional metrical variations, along with its frequent enjambments and caesuras, add elements of surprise that keep the verse from becoming unbearably monotonous. In this way, they reflect the speaker's resistance to the monotonous routines that trapped Bleaney. Similarly, the syntax of the final sentence (lines 21-28) is contorted, as if straining against the poem's formal limits—much as the speaker strains against the limits of his room.
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Meter
"Mr Bleaney" is built on a foundation of iambic pentameter. That is, each line generally uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:
Behind | the door, | no room | for books | or bags —
The poem's passages of perfect iambic pentameter—all of stanza 3, for instance, in which the speaker lies smoking in Mr. Bleaney's old bed—help to evoke the strictures of the speaker's little room and Mr. Bleaney's little life. The meter in those passages feels as monotonously predictable as Mr. Bleaney's day-to-day existence.
But the poem often plays with this meter, varying stresses and rhythms. This variation gives readers the sense that the speaker is internally rebelling, kicking out against Mr. Bleaney's fate—a fate he feels he might be trapped in, too.
For instance, take a look at the way the rhythm changes in line 25:
That how | we live | measures | our own | nature,
This odd, awkward rhythm has two effects. First, it seems to reflect the "dread" the speaker mentions in the previous line, as if the meter itself is rattled. Second, it calls special attention to this line, which encapsulates the speaker's anxiety about whether he deserves his mediocre fate—one of the poem's major themes.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Mr Bleaney" is written in quatrains that follow an ABAB rhyme scheme. This simple, foursquare scheme suits the poem's setting: a sparse little "box" of a room.
Nearly all the poem's rhymes are both exact and masculine: that is, they rhyme on a stressed final syllable (e.g., "stayed"/"frayed," as opposed to a feminine rhyme like "calling"/"falling," whose rhyme words end on an unstressed syllable). These "masculine" endings, too, give the verse a rigid, foursquare quality, with no softening extra syllables. They may even tie in thematically with the stereotypical maleness of the speaker's bachelor pad.
The lone exception comes with the imperfect rhyme in lines 25 and 27, which rhymes an unstressed with a stressed syllable:
That how we live measures our own nature [...]
Than one hired box should make him pretty sureThe slight break from the rhyme pattern (and the variation in the meter in line 25) draws extra attention to this line, which sums up the poem's central question.
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“Mr Bleaney” Speaker
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Biographical evidence, like letters to friends, makes it clear that Philip Larkin based "Mr Bleaney" on an actual room he rented in Hull, England, during the 1950s. At the time, Larkin was in his early 30s, unmarried (as he would remain), working as a librarian, and still establishing his literary career. During this period, he lived in bedsits: single-occupant rooms rented within a larger house. Like the setting of the poem, the house where he wrote "Mr Bleaney" was suburban, run by a landlady—and contained a radio that annoyed him!
It's reasonable to imagine, then, that the speaker is based partly on Larkin himself, even if some of the poem's details are imagined or exaggerated.
From the poem alone, it's clear that the speaker is unattached (he's living alone in a tiny, single-occupant room), that he smokes (he uses Bleaney's old saucer-ashtray), and that he lives a rather austere life (he's able to take a room with no space for "books or bags," even if he might prefer otherwise). Unlike Bleaney, he doesn't enjoy the radio, apparently preferring to listen to his own thoughts. In general, it's clear from the speaker's judgmental language that he dislikes this room—or "hired box"—even though he decides to rent it. He feels ill at ease, and perhaps adrift in life.
Though the poem doesn't give specifics about the speaker's profession or personal situation, it expresses his fear of ending up a lonely mediocrity like Bleaney. In acknowledging "the dread / That how we live measures our own nature," he hints at a desire to live better, aim higher, and escape Bleaney's fate.
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“Mr Bleaney” Setting
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The poem's setting is a rented room in a bedsit or boarding house, which seems to be located on an unimpressive plot of "building land" in a suburban neighborhood. The room was previously occupied by an old bachelor named "Mr Bleaney," who died there. The property is run by a landlady (the speaker of lines 1-3 and 6-7, as well as the "her" in line 14), who got to know Bleaney over the years and recounts his habits to the speaker.
The room—apparently based on the real one Larkin was renting at the time he wrote the poem—is bare, cramped, and drab. It has a single window with a shabby curtain and a view of ugly, "littered" turf. It contains sparse furnishings and dim lighting ("Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb") and has little or no space for personal items ("no hook / Behind the door, no room for books or bags").
Both the room and the house still bear traces of Mr. Bleaney's presence: the "saucer-souvenir" he used as an ashtray, the "fusty bed" that may still carry a whiff of its former occupant, and the "jabbering" of the radio he convinced the landlady to buy. Of course, the landlady's stories about Bleaney are a reminder of his tenancy, too.
Though the speaker decides to "take" the room, he clearly doesn't feel at home there. In fact, he mockingly imagines Bleaney "Telling himself that this was home." The room's oppressive dinginess makes the speaker feel as if he's living in a "hired box"—language that uncomfortably evokes a coffin.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Mr Bleaney”
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Literary Context
From the publication of his second collection, The Less Deceived, in 1955 until his death in 1985, Philip Larkin was one of the UK's most popular poets. The editor-critic J. D. Scott grouped Larkin, along with a number of other post-World War II English writers (including Larkin's close friend Kingsley Amis), into a school he called "The Movement." The Movement poets rejected many of the formal and stylistic experiments of the previous, Modernist generation. They adopted a plainer style along with characteristically English themes—as evidenced by a poem like "Mr Bleaney," a frank portrait of lonely bachelorhood in suburban England.
Larkin wrote "Mr Bleaney" in spring 1955 and published it in the journal The Listener that fall. It was first collected in Larkin's 1964 book The Whitsun Weddings. Along with several other well-known poems from that collection—including "Dockery and Son," "Sunny Prestatyn," and the title poem—it captures a slice of post-WWII English life, finding ominous or unsettling overtones in ordinary situations.
These poems' general attitude is one of blunt realism bordering on bleak cynicism (though some, including "An Arundel Tomb" and "The Whitsun Weddings" itself, contain redemptive notes as well). This attitude became strongly associated with Larkin, who gained a reputation as both a brilliant stylist and a literary curmudgeon. He once famously claimed that "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for [William] Wordsworth." In other words, the kind of loneliness and lack explored in "Mr Bleaney" were his signature poetic subject.
From biographical evidence, including letters to friends, it's clear that "Mr Bleaney" was based on—and written in—an actual room Larkin rented in Hull, England, in 1955. The room was part of a bedsit, a type of cheap boarding house. Larkin spoke well of the house's landlady, really did complain about its "blasted RADIO," and moved to other lodging after a few months. Whether or not he felt exactly as the speaker of "Mr Bleaney" feels, he got out of there as soon as he could.
Historical Context
Following the hardships of World War II, along with the first phase of the decolonization movement that dissolved the British Empire, the UK found itself in reduced circumstances. Having narrowly avoided bankruptcy after the war, Britain was slow to recover economically and entered an "age of austerity" that included rationing of food and raw materials. Prosperity returned to the country during the 1950s, when Larkin wrote "Mr Bleaney," but the memory of wartime belt-tightening remained, along with the sense that Britain's days as a global superpower were over.
Larkin was an Oxford University graduate from an affluent middle-class family, so he didn't share the apparent working-class background of his "Mr Bleaney" character. (Arguably, there's a touch of class snobbery in Larkin's portrait of both Bleaney and his living space.) But his generation witnessed both the austerity years and the subsequent boom years—which brought, for example, a nationwide increase in home ownership, buoyed by government investment in the construction of new homes—and his poetry reflects its time and place in many subtle ways.
Like the speaker of "Mr Bleaney," Larkin lived for a while in bedsits (a.k.a. bed-sitting rooms), a form of cheap lodging whose popularity in Britain increased after the war. Bedsits also appeared in other British literature and media of the period: for example, the plays The Room (Harold Pinter, 1957) and The Bed-Sitting Room (1963, Spike Milligan and John Antrobus). However, Larkin—like many Britons during the postwar decades of renewed prosperity—evidently aspired to better circumstances. He eventually moved into a more spacious flat in Hull, where he remained for nearly two decades, and eventually bought his own house in 1974. Still, for most of his career, he lived modestly (despite his growing literary fame), and he remained a bachelor until he died.
In some ways, then, Larkin's upward-striving impulses mirrored those of his generation—and of the "Mr Bleaney" speaker, to the extent that he feels dissatisfied. But perhaps Larkin's more modest, hermit-like impulses mirrored another side of the "Bleaney" speaker—the side that chooses to live alone in a small room.
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More “Mr Bleaney” Resources
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External Resources
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A Larkin Documentary — Watch the 2003 documentary "Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull."
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The Poet Reads the Poem — Listen to Larkin reading "Mr Bleaney" with a short introduction.
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A Biography of the Poet — Learn more about Larkin's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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Larkin at the British Library — Browse the resources of the Philip Larkin Collection at the British Library.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Philip Larkin
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