Talking in Bed

The bleakness and pessimism that characterizes “Talking in Bed” is apparent in many of Larkin’s poems, including those that deal with the subject of love. Larkin himself was a bachelor, although over the course of his life he had relationships with a number of different women. Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion asserts that Larking wrote “Talking in Bed” about his relationship with Monica Jones, a university lecturer with whom he had a long-distance relationship that began nearly a decade before the poem was written.

Larkin’s letters reveal that he often felt pinched and oppressed by the demands of intimate love relationships, which led him to guard his freedom carefully. A number of his poems suggest that intimate partnership defined by love and marriage is not what people expect it to be. Sooner or later, Larkin believes, love dies, failing the people who trust it to sustain them.

In his poem “Love Songs in Age,” which Larkin completed three years before “Talking in Bed,” a widow finds some old song-books containing tunes she used to love to play when she was young. Playing them again, she is reminded of the feelings she had back then, and how love was “promising to solve, and satisfy, / And set unchangeably in order.