One of Larkin's best-known poems. In a way that is typical of Larkin's verse, the poem moves from an initial scene - a new tenant moving into a new bedsit and speculating on the life of his predecessor - to introduce more general and abstract issues of life, its meaning and purpose. It is also typical in that it is difficult to determine the poet's overall and final stance, because of the evasive ironies and uncertainty of mood (black humour, irony, tragi-comedy?). Does he look down on Mr Bleaney, and on the sad and frayed nature of his life and circumstances? Or does the poet imply that each of us, when it comes down to it, leaves little behind when we die to show for our lives? The poet, with his "books". might well have access to more privileged forms of culture - away from the world of football pools and holidays in Stoke and Frinton - but who is to say whether Mr Bleaney does not live a better, or simply different life to the poet? Mr Bleaney, therefore, may be for the poet what Leopold Bloom is in James Joyce's Ulysses, both an ordinary hero and heroically ordinary. The central difficulty for the poet is, ultimately, the issue of whether or not Mr Bleaney possesses self-awareness, whether he is able to detach himself from what seems, to the outsider, a tawdry and futile life. The poet's closing phrase, "I don't know", leaves the answer in the hands of the reader.
In terms of style the poem manages to move from the empirically concrete world represented by the bedsit to more abstract and speculative issues of life, death and the place of the individual in society. Throughout the poem Larkin deploys figurative language to capture both the ordinariness of Mr Bleaney's life, and the chilliness and dreariness of that life. Beyond this, however, the poem's use of the room as an analogy for more abstract forms of containers - the body, the environment, the life - helps to transform an apparently straightforward vignette into a more complex form of speculation and reflection. The poem's simplicity of form, with seven quatrains of iambic pentameter and simple abab rhyming patterns, is inevitably deceptive in this case.