Unpacking Poetry: analysis with clarity, commentary with heart.

Introduction

This series is mostly aimed at A-Level students wanting to get much deeper into their studied poems.

I’ll be taking requests, too. Which poem would you like to see me write about?

♻️ Share this with the poetry students in your life, please. Poetry deserves an ‘understanding ear’¹ …

I’ll follow my usual tutoring convention of highlighting in bold any technical terms students ought to be using fluently in your own analyses. I’m waiting for someone to ask for a glossary, hint, hint … for now you’ll have to right-click on the words!

Want some help with improving your technical knowledge, or with Larkin? You know where to ask.

Instructions

The poem appears at the end of this post. I highly recommend you read it, preferably out loud, and have a think about it for a good 5 minutes or so before looking at my thoughts on it. If you’re a student, you need to flex your muscles at reacting and responding to unseen poems before the exams ask you to do exactly that thing.

Overview

When I wrote about Christina Rossetti’s ‘No, Thank You, John’, I discussed my wariness about definitively stating that a poem is autobiographical – certainly in an exam scenario. So naturally, I’m going to throw that advice out of the window today!  

In fairness, in this I’m standing on the shoulders of Andrew Motion, Larkin’s friend and biographer (and of course, a Poet Laureate himself).

When ‘Talking In Bed’ was written, we know that Larkin was in a relationship with Monica Jones, and Motion tells us that this is ‘one of the few poems he wrote about himself and Monica’.²

What was the state of their relationship? By this stage they had been ‘together’ (if anyone was truly ‘together’ with Larkin) for almost fifteen years. But like the speaker in the poem, Larkin has run out of things to say to her. Around this time, Monica lost both her parents in a short period, and Motion tells us 

‘the intimacy they had shared for fourteen years almost might not have existed.’

Larkin didn’t even visit Monica during this period to offer her some consolation. One way of looking at this was that he was trying to provoke her to leave him.

She made excuses for him instead.

If I were summing this poem up in one sentence I might choose ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. It seems it could equally apply to Larkin’s treatment of women in general.

Analysis and Commentary

Three might be ‘the magic number’, but here the tercet arrangement of each stanza is jarring. The middle line of each of the first three stanzas interpose themselves like something which has come between these abstract lovers. Perhaps significantly, it also stops short, of course, of becoming a sonnet.

Those middle lines separate an awkward, slightly dislocated rhyme scheme which is still intricate and deliberate. Look at the way in which the middle line of stanza one becomes the rhyme for the divided couplet in stanza two, and so on.

So there’s pattern – the kind of pattern that only emotional coolness can create – and continuity, and we can plausibly imagine it symbolising that couple lying in bed night after night, year after year, with that huge unspoken something between them, and the relationship not quite gelling, perhaps even were that something gone.

Whether commenting on himself and Monica or not, Larkin adopts the persona of the detached, reflective individual which is such a trademark of his poems in The Whitsun Weddings.

He observes with a clinical disinterest that the time lovers spend in bed ‘ought’ to be the easiest, and the modal verb immediately implies a sense of disappointment, of anti-climax. He seems to be writing about a long-term relationship here, where the frisson of love, sexual excitement, and vulnerability, has long since worn off. Sharing a bed has become an ‘emblem’ of the relationship, implying many things, but like the 1950s Blues song, ‘The Thrill is Gone’³.

Long gone.

Early in the relationship, talking in bed would have been secondary to more physical activities. Now, perhaps, the speaker is mourning a loss of sexual intimacy and desire caused by being over-familiar with his partner. It’s worth pointing out that whilst other commentators seem to swerve any sexualisation of this poem, I’m relying on context here.

We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that Larkin was uninterested in women or sex.

Even shy, clumsy, and misogynist as he was, Larkin wanted those things. What he didn’t want was to be tied down, to have his poetic mojo diluted or silenced  – perhaps Arnold’s fate in ‘Self’s The Man’ is a warning of how bad it could get. [see ‘Related Poems’, below]

In 1950, Larkin wrote

‘my relations with women are governed by a shrinking sensitivity’

Ten years later, if this persona is anything to go by, the first flush of excitement didn’t last much longer than the chase and sexual conquest of a woman.

Larkin’s true emotional side was reserved for his art.

Back to the poem. Almost like John Donne’s aubade poems, the bedroom takes on an interesting relationship to time. [see ‘Related Poems’, below] The bed could be a time capsule where very little seems to change, but time ‘passes silently’. The sibilance here means I can almost hear the quiet hiss of sand grains whispering their one-way journey through the neck of an hourglass. As it does, the world outside ebbs and flows, changing constantly with the wind’s ‘unrest’. The bigger picture of human life is represented by the sinister ‘dark town’ motif.

In the early stages of the relationship, the lovers might feel they can defy the world whilst in bed – we see that everywhere in literature, from Donne to Orwell, but the world continues to ‘heap’ up, regardless, obscuring and limiting the ‘horizon’ of the speaker’s hopes and dreams.⁴

Much like Larkin feared what suburban married life would do to his poetry.

Line 8 is arrestingly nihilistic. The unadorned simple sentence is bleak and quashes any thoughts of love or romance being powerful. As he launches into his final, multi-clause sentence, spanning both lines and stanzas and by far longer than any other, we get a sense that this is actually what the persona has been wanting to say. 

‘Talking in bed’ has become a silence into which he almost blurts out this complex sentence. The first three enjambed lines aren’t end-stopped, resulting in the pace increasing as if the speaker is rushing to verbalise the idea before guilt overtakes him. The change in rhyme scheme to a rhyming triplet helps accelerate delivery, like the breathless relief of something long felt but kept inside.

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind

Like so many seemingly throwaway endings in Larkin’s poems, this one is devastating.

Pausing at the end of the penultimate line with a comma, perhaps the speaker has exhausted his long-rehearsed script on the oxymoronic loneliness and isolation he feels as part of a couple. The confusing clumsiness of the finishing double-negatives suggests a distressing afterthought. His dilemma seems to be that speaking his truth would be unkind to her (implicitly because she doesn’t share his feelings), but lying to her is unkind to him.

So the persona is silent within the relationship, distant because he can’t even bring himself to be neutral, and this bleak relationship continues this silent cycle without end or hope of improving. If we were mapping this exactly to Larkin’s life, it does seem to reflect his inability to break off the relationship with Monica Jones, waiting for her to tire of him and finish it instead of muttering the ‘unkind words’ himself. 

Linked Poem(s)

Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’: another meditation on a the image and reality of a seemingly happy marriage – very open to interpretation

‘Self’sThe Man’: another long-term relationship turned sour

John Donne, ‘The Good Morrow’ and

‘The Sun Rising’: these aubades show what the persona might have felt after the first night spent in bed with his lover …

Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Disgrace’: a relationship changes over time.

‘Mean Time’: more thoughts on the eroding power of time

‘Close’: the reflective aftermath of sleeping together

Over to you: which other poems which might match this one?

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Philip Larkin: ‘Talking In Bed’ (1960)

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.


Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest			[5]

Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,


And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation


It becomes still more difficult to find			[10]

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.

1. Stephen King, Different Seasons (London: Viking Press, 1982) ↩︎
2. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2010) ↩︎
3. Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell, ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ (1951) My second favourite Blues song … ↩︎
4. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949) ↩︎