Philip Larkin's poem 'Talking in Bed' is very simple poetry at its best. It tells the truth about life and what relationships can gradually descend into over time. It explores the theme that no matter how close we are to someone, we can still experience intense depths of loneliness. The poet uses pathetic fallacy to convey this somewhat intangible and ironic loneliness through his imagery and tone of the poem. The language emphasises the feelings of what an empty marriage may feel like. The poem also gives the impression it is from the male's perspective.
             The poem is written in four stanzas, each with three lines of usually ten syllables apiece. This makes it a short lyrical ballad. These types of poems are used mainly to express a certain feeling of the protagonist, which is achieved through the tone, the language, and the imagery.
             There are many examples of imagery in this poem, all of which show two people in bed, lying close to each other but somewhat distant in their relations as they realise how much they have changed; 'Lying together there... an emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently.' The imagery in those few lines is so strong in what it depicts. When reading those lines, the reader gets the image of two people in a committed relationship that are so awkward in bed, supposedly the most intimate of places, because they have grown so far apart in terms of their relationship. The protagonist sums this up in his final stanza when he says;
             It becomes still more difficult to find
             In this final stanza, the poet is summing up the feeling of the poem by saying that as time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult to express how they feel about one another, how it is hard to find words that were 'once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind'. The
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