There's a lot of bad love poetry out there -- superficial, sentimental, vapid, vain. I used to have a website where I put up some romantic poetry that gets it right. Really, it was in a desire to inform tastes, because when amateur poetry goes bad, it's never worse than when it touches on the heartstrings. So, once again in that spirit, I offer up a poem by Philip Larkin.

I've been thinking about the following poem lately, since a couple of students have written on it. It's the final stanza that packs the punch, especially the last line. But, even more subtly, it's the existential broadening of the second and third stanzas that make the difference.

Landscape description in poetry can seem a mere generic convention, but here, Larkin uses it to set a mood and then express a philosophical connection between the personal and the profound. Gone is the pure passion and the Holy Grail of storybook romance, which only lasts so long as fantasy is sustained.

Present instead is a growing sense of distance between a more realistically drawn, committed couple. Their physical closeness, when contrasted with the isolation without, should increase their intimacy. The landscape's lack of care / responsivenss ought to give them a deepened sense of that for one another. But, it doesn't.

The need is present, but the ability to connect, honestly, tenderly, readily, isn't -- they are too vulnerable, know one another too well, for that.

Talking in Bed
Philip Larkin (c/p 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
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
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.