Talking in Bed

“Talking in Bed” is a poem in which the speaker has already found, and calmly concedes, our separateness, disconnection as individual human beings. It recognizes humans as impermeable, sensing ingredients in an ominously transacting world. Contrary to the hopeful myth of a protected place of reported intimacy – in bed, likely post-sex – we find two people in mute, disconcerted remoteness. A place where talking – our overheated invention – is bound in awful honesty to silence.

Reference to “Lying together” as “An emblem of two people being honest” is telling because we depend on gathering and believing in symbols – like poems, churches, city halls, memes – to construct a sense of narrative and depth. But an emblem is just a representation like a cross or a pentagram and has no real effect other than as a hanger for threads of belief. The reality in the poem finds the emblem false with the two people in bed concave in isolation and unable to find, in the entire, seeking philosophy of words – either “true and kind” or “not untrue and not unkind” – an intimate touch.

This absence of intimacy germinates in a world indifferently bestirred by “the wind’s incomplete unrest”. This world in which we slightly reside appears to be one of a tumbling chemical or mechanical reaction embodied in this mindless “incomplete unrest” where there will never be completion, rest or stasis (or intimacy). Worse it is a world where, as part of this tumbling process, “dark towns heap up on the horizon”. This is not civilization as we would like to believe in it – another fragile emblem. These are ominous organizations – “dark towns” – that mount or congeal – “heap up” – from some collusion of needs, pressures, and unknowns likely inspired only by the blunt, spiritless need to survive.

“Talking in Bed” contains, in places, firm, yet bracingly contrapuntal, language. “the wind’s incomplete unrest” is an example where the words seem to spin back-and-forth to each other and never stop. “unrest” already expresses a condition of not being completed. “incomplete unrest” seems to posit that unrest, a state of flux and urgency, is a natural, self-seeking condition, unrest as an unending state. Consider also the meaning-resistant phrase “At this unique distance from isolation” which, on the surface, with some work, seems to refer to an image of the proximity of these two people together in bed, but its language abuts this image in subtle anarchy, affronting the idea of closeness: the words “unique”, “distance” and “isolation” all suggest solitariness. So, the individual words seem to refract against the practical meaning of the phrase. This feels jarring and unresolvable and is an example of the manipulation and expanded jurisdiction of language that Larkin seems able – or rather works hard – to create in his poetry.