The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,

It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes and The Thought Fox

The Thought-Fox is an animal poem with a difference. Ted Hughes 'captured' his fox at the same
time as he completed the poem. The fox manifests within the poem, the fox is the poem and both
are a product of the poet's imagination.
'So you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never
suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through
imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words.' Ted Hughes (Poetry in the Making)
This was no coincidence. Ted Hughes, through his lifelong interest in mythology and
symbology, considered the fox his totemic animal. It would turn up in dreams at critical times in
his life as a kind of spirit guide.
One such dream occurred whilst he was at Cambridge University, studying English. In a
particularly busy schedule he found himself with lots of essays to write and struggled to finish
them. In a dream he was confronted by 'a figure that was at the same time a skinny man and a
fox walking upright on its hind legs.'
This incinerated fox-man approached, put a bloody paw-hand on his shoulder and said 'Stop this
- you are destroying us.'
Ted Hughes accepted this as a message from his subconscious, a symbol - stop all this academic
nonsense because you are destroying the creative impulse within.
The Thought-Fox could well have been created for this very reason - the poet wanted to
permanently safeguard his totem by combining the two worlds in one poem, the fox slowly,
carefully forming out of the poet's language.
Themes
Creative Acts
The Imagination
Animal Totems
The Subconscious
The Poetic Impulse
Animal Mythology
The Thought-Fox Themes
The Act of Writing
"The Thought-Fox" provides a metaphorical glimpse into the act of writing—or, more precisely,
one poet's struggle to write. The poem explicitly mentions the loneliness writing demands, and
the late nights many writers spend slaving over their work, waiting for inspiration to strike, or
obsessively exploring an idea. At the same time, "The Thought-Fox" also suggests that writing is
innate and organic: while a specific image or event may inspire a first line, a poem ultimately
comes from the dark forest of its poet's mind.
Inspiration
Ironically, the fickle nature of inspiration inspires "The Thought-Fox. " The speaker's feeling that
"something more near" lurks beneath his window outside, closer than the night's absent stars,
suggests that inspiration need not be lofty; it can be right in front of us, waiting for us take
notice. Just before the "sudden sharp hot stink of fox" enters "the dark hole" of the speaker's
head, the speaker remarks that the fox is merely "Coming about its own business." There is
nothing particularly special about this fox, besides the fact that it was in the right place at the
right time, and the speaker happened to pay attention to him.
Nature
Nature plays a powerful role across Hughes' body of work, and "The Thought-Fox" is no
exception. The poem takes place in a home near the edge of the forest on a dark, snowy night.
This setting corresponds to the loneliness writing often involves, while the dark, dense forest
represents creative potency lying dormant, waiting to be activated. The poem suggests that being
a writer is like living alone in the middle of this forest, unsure of what lies beyond its clearing,
but both anxious and eager to discover what lurks in its depths. Specifically, the fox bears a
personal significance for Hughes, which will be explored later in this guide.

Analysis of The Thought Fox

The Thought Fox is a six stanza poem, all quatrains, with one or two full end rhymes and hints of
slant rhyme here and there. There is no set metre (in US meter) but through careful use of
punctuation and enjambment (where one line runs into another without losing the sense) the
rhythms of the fox as it moves onto the page come through.
Set in the present, this poem entices the reader in to an intimate midnight world that is not quite
real and not quite imagination. The poet, the speaker, is all alone near the window with just the
clock ticking.
In his mind there are stirrings, something else is alive and very close but it is deep within the
interior, perhaps in the subconscious, almost an abstract entity. The only way to coax it out is
with words, conscious living words.
Tone/Atmosphere
The tone is one of mystery and dream-like suspension; the speaker is alone so all is quiet as the
imagined time of midnight approaches. It's dark. Just what is this person up to as they move from
the mind to the real world and back again?
The atmosphere is pregnant with anticipation in the first two stanzas. Something is entering the
loneliness but the reader isn't given explicit details, in fact, this is not an objective look at a fox at
all.
 This fox, this hybrid thought-fox, is subjected to the quiet will of the poet who slowly but
surely draws the fox out of the imagination and onto the page in an almost magical
fashion.
Further Analysis
The Thought-Fox touches on the mystery of creation and brings to the reader the idea that the act
of creating, in this case the writing of a poem, is sparked by something beyond time and space.
The first two stanzas set the scene. They suggest that within the loneliness and darkness is a life
process, an energy that exists and moves instinctively into time. It has no form or shape or
consciousness at this moment. The poet has to write it into reality.
The alliterative soft consonant m is gentle (and similar to the first line of the The Windhover by
Gerard Manley Hopkins) and compliments the repeated loneliness, the deeper within
darkness. Note too the long vowels that stretch out time as the consciousness awakens.
In the third stanza the soft consonant d and skilfully placed punctuation, help keep the pace and
rhythm slow. The reader knows something is about to appear but is uncertain until line 2 when
the fox's nose manifests, smelling a twig, a leaf in the imaginary forest.
This is a wonderful image. The dark snow is the blank page; the poetic energy is about to be
released, is being released. But both silence and solitude are necessary for the words to form, for
the fox to make progress.
Ted Hughes chose to use the fox as the poetic impulse because it was a creature close to his
heart, a symbolic guide. The flow and rhythm of the latter part of the poem capture the silky
movements, the light measured skips, the quick trot of the now lively fox.
The third stanza beautifully reflects the careful steps the fox has to make, as now repeats four
times and the reader is taken along into the fourth stanza with the tracks already being 'printed' in
the snow.
Imagery intensifies as the shadow of the fox, the poetic doubt, makes progress through the
snowy wood, slowing down, being wary, then bold and always instinctive. This is the poem as
the mind and finger construct it out of imaginary material, the personified fox transformed into
words that seem to form of their own accord.
And the poet's vision finally, unmistakably becomes one with the page as the darkness of the
mind and Reynard meet once again, the senses alive with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, the real
world left none the wiser as the poem is crafted.
 Church Going
Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
 A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Analysis
“Church Going” is one of the best of Philip Larkin’s poems. The title itself is puzzling. It gives
us two different meanings. One meaning is that it is a regular visit to a church. The other shows
the decline of the institution because people lost faith in God and religion. His greatest virtues
are clarity and close observation of social life, perfect control over feeling and tone. The
language is always simple and lucid and the idiom has great variety. Through his poetry Larkin
advises us not to be deceived by illusions or ideals. He asks us to have a better awareness of
man’s weaknesses. Larkin is called a sceptic poet. He enters the church as a sceptic who does not
have any faith in the church. But he slowly realizes the truth that church fulfils a deeply felt
human need and that it is “a serious house on a serious earth it is”.

Making sure that nothing is going on inside, the speaker of the poem enters the church and closes
the door behind him. He finds that it is just like any other church. He also notices the furniture,
furnishings such as the plate, the pyx, prayer books, the Bible, flowers cut for Sunday holy Mass,
matting, seats, the baptismal font and the organ. There are no worshippers in the church and the
silence tensed him. He looks around him with contempt and he feels a bad smell when he stands
staring at the altar where the church services are conducted. Having observed these details, the
speaker takes off his cycle-clips in an act of mock-reverence. He did not wear a hat.

The speaker then moves forward and touches the baptismal font with his hands. He notices that
the roof looks almost new but he does not know whether it has been cleaned or restored because
he is not a regular church-goer. Then he mounts the lectern and began to read out a few verses
from the Bible. After that he comes back to the door and signs the visitor’s book and donates an
Irish six pence which has no value in England. Thus all his activities and manners inside the
church show that he is a sceptic who has no faith in the church service. Finally he thinks that his
time is wasted, because the place is not worth visiting at all.

But the speaker could not avoid the church. Over and again he visited the church and each time
his skeptical attitude grew less and less. This time he stood inside the churching thinking about
its future. As science and technology began to develop, people lost faith in the institution of
church. In future, churches will become empty and completely out of use. A few cathedrals may
be preserved as museums for future generation because of its great art and architectural value.
Their parchment, the plate and the pyx may be kept in locked cases. But other church buildings
will become sheltering centers for sheep and other animals and poor people during rainy time.
Sometime people may avoid such places as unlucky because of its graveyard. The speaker of the
poem thinks that perhaps the church will become the centre of superstitions in the coming years.
But if faith disappeared, naturally superstition will also be disappeared because both are
connected with each other. Finally the church buildings will tumble down and only its concrete
pillars would be standing as silent witness of the past glory of the church. The church path will
be over grown with grass, weeds and creepers. It will become a deserted place. In course of time
future generation will forget even the shape of the churches.

Now the speaker of the poem reflects who will be the last person to visit the church for its
purpose. It may be a lover of antiquity who is eager to see very old things or some Christmas-
addict who visits church only on important occasions such as the Easter or Christmas and he
wants to enjoy the smell of myrrh burnt, the flowers, the choir music, the dress worn by the choir
and the priest and the music of the organ.

Finally the speaker realizes that the church is a serious house on a serious earth. A church is a
symbol of man’s sincere search for the ultimate meaning of life. Science and technology cannot
solve his spiritual needs. That is why the speaker himself comes to the church again and again
when he is tired of the problems of life. A church is equipped with baptismal fond, flowers and
the graveyard where “all human glories are buried” with his bones. Thus the ceremonies of most
important events in man’s life such as birth, marriage and death are conducted in the church. In
this sense we can say that this is a religious poem. Thus the first meaning of the title “Church
Going” is affirmed. The poem underlines the truth that the power and the glory of God cannot be
destroyed by the advancement of science and technology. On the other hand the church will
continue to be the centre focusing universal love and peace and giving spiritual solace to man’s
problems and sufferings in his life.
Themes
Religion
The Established Church
The Need to Worship
The Ceremony of Ritual
The Future of the Church
Superstition
Religious Feeling
Analysis of Church Going
A poem of seven stanzas, each with nine iambic pentameter lines mostly, all with end rhymes, a
mix of slant and full. So this reflects tradition, the common metre (meter in USA) of the land,
setting a steady five beats per line on average:
Of gown-and-band and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
And note the astute use of enjambment - when one line flows into another, without punctuation,
to keep the sense flowing - particularly strong in stanzas five and six but present in each one.
Larkin uses an interesting rhyme scheme too; ababcaece, which is sometimes full and often
slant: on/stone/organ from the first stanza, come/some/random from the fourth,
and is/destinies/serious from the last.
Full rhyme confirms sense whilst slant rhyme questions it. The fact that Larkin uses a lot of slant
rhyme in this poem must be significant. Is he suggesting that, whilst he acknowledges the history
and importance of a building like a church, he questions the notion of worshipping a god?
Tone/Attitude
The title is interesting as it implies that the poem is about the regular worshippers, the
churchgoers, those who turn up each Sunday, yet, the opening line seems to suggest that this is
not the case at all.
This churchgoer is someone a little different, probably the poet himself, timidly soft-footing it in
to the church only because it is empty. The speaker is drawn to the tense, musty, unignorable
silence of yet another church, curious to find out more about why he's there, wondering what to
look for.
It's quite clear that the speaker has an initial tongue-in-cheek approach to the interior. There is a
hint that he thinks it like a brewery (Brewed God knows how long); he has an awkward
reverence and in fact doesn't stay that long. But he does sign the book, a sign of respect, whilst
the donation of an Irish sixpence is worthless.
This churchgoer is ambivalent, unsure of his own religious feelings. Is he in the church to find
solace, or is he only there to have a go at those who have faith?
Larkin teases the reader, presenting a rational argument laced with doubt and agnostic cynicism.
Acerbic in tone, the speaker is just human enough to acknowledge that A serious house on
serious earth it is, suggesting that people will always need a holy space to worship in.
Diction/Language
This poem is packed with a rich mixture of common and rare vocabulary. It can be read out loud,
it can be whispered quietly, it can be read in silence - it seems to satisfy all criteria for the
reading of a poem.
 Stanza by stanza there are notable combinations:
door thud shut/some brass and stuff....assonance and vowel variety
Hectoring/Here endeth....hectoring means bullying in an intimidating way...Here endeth is the
classic King James bible wrap-up phrase for the end of a sermon.
parchment,plate and pyx....church artifacts (old paper/text, silver or metal trays and plates, a
round container containing the consecrated host)
pick simples for a cancer...to use medicinal herbs to cure a cancer.
rood-lofts/ruin-bibber...a display gallery above the rood screen/someone addicted to ruins (rood-
crucifix)(bibber-person who imbibes specified drink)
accoutred frowsty barn...impressive stuffy barn (a disparaging phrase)
blent air all our compulsions meet...a poetic use of blended, so a mix of air, where people are
urged or forced to do certain things (note the change from the singular I to our).
 Readers will note the almost sneaky way the speaker enters the church, only when there's
nothing going on, and moves forward through the tense, musty silence, Brewed God
knows how long, before mockingly announcing Here endeth and listening to the response
- The echoes snigger briefly.
The language is that of a non-believer certainly, an atheist perhaps but not such a devout one,
and gives the reader the impression that here is someone out to poke fun at the established
church. He's in and out in double-quick time.
 What follows is reflection, sparked by the simple observation that this is something he
does on a regular basis. How curious to visit a place that makes him feel at a loss. Then
comes inquiry - wondering, What we shall, if we shall, Shall we before finally there
appears a rough philosophical outcome, to be more serious, gravitating, was proper to
grow wise in.
Summary
This is a poem of unusual reflection although it starts out ordinarily enough.
The speaker appears to be a person who frequents churches with the attitude of a museum-goer -
he's only there for the history and the architecture, and to have a laugh with a biblical text - yet
he is humble in one respect: he rides a bicycle and wears old fashioned clips to stop chain oil
getting onto his clothes.
He feels he has to do this, perhaps because he's been brought up in a god-fearing environment,
where it is proper to be clean; after all, cleanliness is next to godliness, as the saying goes.
After mounting the lectern, which suggests he fancies himself as a minister, a vicar, a priest, he
confesses an ignorance, which is a pretext, for he knows a lot about church interiors, and knows
the names of things.
This humble cyclist is more than he makes out, for he starts to ask himself serious questions
about churches in general, what sort of future have they in a world that seems to be ignoring
religious tradition. A world that's becoming more secular, more materialistic.
Has it been mere superstition holding the fabric of the church together for so long? Power of
some sort has to continue but how? Just imagine a time when the last ever person leaves a place
of worship such as this. It could a carpenter, a pious tourist, an aged worshipper - or someone
else with a religious impulse who wants to rebuild and start over?
Ambulances
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,

Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness

That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air

May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far

From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are
Short Analysis
‘Ambulances’ was completed in January 1961 and published in Philip Larkin’s third major
collection, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). You can read ‘Ambulances’ here; this post offers
some notes towards an analysis of Larkin’s poem.
‘Ambulances’, in summary, is a poem about death. The poem describes what happens when
somebody critically ill is taken away to hospital in an ambulance. Passers-by witness the
ambulance as they are going about their ordinary lives, catching a glimpse of the person’s white
face (denoting sickness) as they (the gender of the person is not specified) are placed in the
ambulance on a stretcher. Witnessing this scene prompts these observers to muse upon their own
mortality, because they sense that the person who has just been carried away in the ambulance –
and many ‘poor souls’ carried away in ambulances – never come out of hospital alive. The full
life that this person once lived – their life with their family, their changing observance of various
fashions – all ‘loosens’ into nothingness. They end up in a room on their own, as we all do. In
summary, then, ‘Ambulances’ is a bleak poem.

Yet in spite of this bleak subject, the poem also contains Philip Larkin’s usual touches: his
ambivalence towards death, for instance. He would later write ‘Aubade’, a chilling and eloquent
poem about the fear of his own impending death, but in ‘Ambulances’ death is described as a
‘solving emptiness’, as if death is a corrective to the horrible mistake that is Life. A horrible and
final one, perhaps, but then Larkin wasn’t always much keen on life either!

But overall the poem is not exactly uplifting. The connection between ambulances and death is
established in the opening words, ‘Closed like confessionals’: as well as physically likening the
ambulances to confessional booths in a church, this simile also reminds us of the Christian
tradition of having a priest to attend a dying person, so that they might confess their sins before
passing away. In describing the ambulances threading through ‘loud noons of cities’, Larkin
subtly likens the prime of life to the midday point of the day, and in doing so suggests both the
inevitable end of that day, and the brevity of it (‘Stop and consider! Life is but a day’, as Keats
had put it). The reference to ‘arms on a plaque’ evokes the coat of arms inscribed on a
gravestone or other memorial marker, again suggesting death.

Throughout ‘Ambulances’ Larkin goes to some effort to emphasise the individuality of our
lives, yet of course the central meaning of the poem is that we are all ultimately united by the
fact that we are going to die someday. Somehow emphasising our differences and uniqueness
only makes this sadder: ‘Ambulances’ is a sort of modern take on John Donne’s famous sermon
(‘No man is an island’), yet it manages a fine balance between commonality and individuality,
between what unites us and what makes us distinctive. This is a tricky thing to achieve, yet the
poem does it: on the one hand we have the reference to the ‘smells of different dinners’ which
the women smell while going home with the shopping, and the reference to the ‘unique random
blend’ that made the life of the ambulance’s passenger so special to him and his family. Yet on
the other hand we have references to ‘any kerb’, ‘All streets’, and the sense of death lying ‘just
under all we do’. Note how the passers-by who see the person being placed in the ambulance
whisper ‘Poor soul’ in sympathy for this stranger, yet they do so ‘at their own distress’, implying
distress at the awareness that they themselves will one day be taken away like that. We are both
strikingly different in terms of our social and cultural attributes and allegiances, but ‘Old and
young, we are all on our last cruise’, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it.

‘Ambulances’ grapples with one of the key themes of Philip Larkin’s poetry: death and our own
sense of our mortality. In this analysis we’ve focused on one of the most noteworthy aspects of
the poem, which is its blend of human individuality and common humanity. That ambulance
dulls ‘all we are’.
 Mr. Bleaney
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.

The poem addresses the key themes of loneliness and the shallowness of human life from the
outset. The name ‘Mr Bleaney as the title evokes the emotion of insipidness as the word
conjugation is very monotonous with no strong syllables. Similar to the nature of the room
Larkin describes, the name has little stimulation. This monotony is reinforced in the concept
of him renting a ‘room’ as this has little status in comparison of being an ‘owner’. The theme
of the shallowness of existence is present from the clinical nature in which the landlord refers
to his death as ‘they moved him’. The use of indifferent language to refer to his death shows
the little care for the ending of his life. The lack of pride Mr Bleaney felt for the room is
shown in the deficiency of home comforts. The ‘upright chair’ and ‘no hook behind the door’
symbolises the pragmatic nature of Mr Bleaney’s life, he didn’t make an impression on the
room. The use of ‘sixty watt’ bulb reinforces the idea of an eerie glow, evocative of the
theme of loneliness. The description of the flowered curtains as ‘thin and frayed’ coupled
with the ‘fusty bed’ evokes the idea of decay and the inconsequentiality of his existence. The
use of ‘one hired box’ to describe the room evokes the image of a coffin. Fused with the
reference to ‘they moved him’ Larkin shows Mr Bleaney’s life to be one of inconsequence as
others affect him, he does not make things happen he allows others to make decisions for
him.
ANALYSIS
Mr Bleaney’ by Phillip Larkin is essentially a poem about a circumstantial situation that is
given as dramatic monologue, and rather like a drama, tells a story that is full of 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 reader is presented with a landlady showing a
perspective lodger a room that has been vacated by her previous tenant, the mysterious Mr
Bleaney. Mysterious in that he seems to be an ethereal entity, and is never presented to the
reader, except as a metaphor for what has gone before. Appearing in the first half of the
poem in a recollected past, the landlady’s past. The first half of the poem is slow and
deliberate and helps to create a macabre feel to the poem. A change of pace occurs in the
second half of the poem though not immediately apparent. It does seem to be despairingly
urgent, as Mr Bleaney subtly moves from a recollected past to an observed present, through
his mediation with the new tenant.

Larkin has used the landlady and to some extent Mr Bleaney, as the focus for the humour in
the poem but it is the landlady who comes across as the comic if somewhat pitiful character.
The ironic humour is used as the lighter side of the poem to contrast its dark overtones and
highlights the contrasting duality that is inherent throughout.

It becomes apparent as the drama unfolds that Mr Bleaney had been a simple but predictable
man. As the landlady shows her client the dingy room in the first stanza, one gets a sense that
the landlady regret’s the loss of her last tenant. It was his utterly predictable routine that she
had come to depend on, and forces beyond her control had taken this away from her. In the
tonal quality of the landlady’s speech one can almost hear the resignation in her voice and it
almost sounds as if she’s tutting.

THEMES
1. Loneliness and isolation “No more to show than one hired box” • Larkin implies how
lonely Mr Bleaney is, yet he is choosing the same life as him • Others merely tolerate
 him; “The Frinton folk who put him up” • His only relationship is with his landlady, who
still refers to him formally • What is the definition of home? Is it where we live, or where
we feel safe, comfortable and loved? • Perhaps Larkin can never class this room as his
home, because it is irrevocably associated with Mr Bleaney Home
2. Freedom • Mr Bleaney is at the mercy of others • He doesn’t have control over his own
situation, so is seemingly weak • He has no power to change his dilapidated location •
Perhaps Bleaney gambles to achieve freedom from his dismal life, yet his perpetual
spending may be enchaining him in a vicious circle of poverty • Mr Bleaney could have
passed away • The room is associated with Bleaney, yet he is no longer there. This is a
constant reminder of absence and loss • The flowers on the curtain seem to have died,
becoming “thin and frayed”, perhaps due to neglect or unhappiness • Bleaney’s already
dismal life is further shadowed by the collapse of the manufacturing industry in the 70s
Death and loss
3. Realism- In "Mr. Bleaney", Larkin has described the life of an ordinary man. Mr.
Bleaney is actually a post war tattered person who doesn't realise the importance of time.
He observes that the room is dirty and there is no room for books. It also contains
autobiographical elements.
4. Loneliness and Alienation which means "a sense of not belonging, either to a community
or to one's own sense of self" are the recurrent themes of LARKIN. His poem "Mr.
Bleaney" is about the wretched plight of modern man and its pleasures. MR. BLEANEY
lives in abject poverty because of economic pressures. The poet satirizes at the modern
civilization which is going to dogs. It is full of chaos and there is no hope for betterment
in the life of a common man.
5. Love
PATHETIC FALLACY “the frigid wind tousling the clouds” • a strong force is controlling the
clouds, reflecting Mr Bleaney’s own vulnerability to the pressures of the world “till they moved
him” • Mr Bleaney is at the mercy of more powerful people, just like the clouds blown about by
the wind • The dim lighting and chilling wind mirror how dead, cold and depressing his life is
THE BOTTOM LINE “How we live measures our own nature” • This statement is paradoxical •
How we live indicates the kind of person we are but the kind of person we are dictates how we
live • The universal application of this statement is clear from the first person plural pronoun
‘we’ • Other people also influence us, just like Mr Bleaney influences Larkin • Larkin spends
most of the poem worrying that he is turning into Mr Bleaney • Through following Bleaney’s
way of living, perhaps this is the actual destiny of his nature