In her social poetry of the 1930's Dorothy Livesay is concerned principally with human fellowship and the poems call for freedom from capitalist tyranny. There is no mention of the problem of freedom for each individual: the question of the roles played in society by man and woman is not raised….

Her later poems, however, show a greater interest in woman's individuality, her need for freedom, her right to exist in her own way. Woman as herself is very much a part of her love poems…. The love poems in The Unquiet Bed are preceded by a section of personal poems in which the poet concentrates on various aspects of herself as woman. (p. 26)

[Most of the poems in the second section] are directly concerned in an unpretentious way with the problem of woman's position in modern society. Dorothy Livesay still insists that woman is involved in the natural cycle of growth. In "Sunfast" she sees herself as part of the whole life force symbolized by the sun. She takes in the sun like food; the sun refreshes and re-orders the world just as human beings try to establish patterns….

The feeding on nature, the immersion in it as well as the recognition of one's place in it, is expressed in several poems in the second section of The Unquiet Bed, for instance, "Process". "Pear Tree" has the same notion at its centre. (p. 27)

The question of individuality in relation to the male-female principle Dorothy Livesay herself finds so prevalent in her poetry crops up humorously in the poem "Flower Music", particularly in the section titled "Peony."… [The] sense of opposition and contradiction between male and female, expressed somewhat obliquely in the poem, is very much a part of Dorothy Livesay's view of human love, and it turns up in the next section of The Uniquiet Bed which is devoted exclusively to love poems.

But these love poems were not the first that Dorothy Livesay wrote. There are quite a number of love poems in Signpost, and it is interesting to look at them now to see how her views on the role of woman have changed. The love poems in Signpost are attempts to express the changing moods and emotions of a love affair. They are personal poems but they are also objectified to make more universal statements about love…. I think that Dorothy Livesay is much surer of herself as a woman in the later poems so that she can afford to be more open, direct and honest, make the poems in fact much more personal. The early poems still have some romanticism clinging to them, although some of the poems are admirable statements of the way-ward passions, misgivings, deceits and contradictions of love. And certainly they are the first attempts in Canadian poetry to express a modern approach to love, even though they are not always successful. (pp. 27-8)

[In these early poems Dorothy Livesay], in talking of the immense external reality in terms of an outer darkness, often used the image of enclosed space within which she kept the darkness at bay. But even in erecting a shell around one, one senses that it is futile. In the same way, love seems to be an enormous force in the love poems in Signpost and defences against it are fragile, particularly as love demands frankness and searches out the private sanctities of personality. Even if one of the partners takes refuge in nature, as the poet suggests in "Sun," recognizing the naturalness of love, then the other partner can uncover the whole, can see everything open to his eye as he looks at nature. (p. 29)

The notion … of distance, a notion that crops up time and again in Dorothy Livesay's poetry, a distance between people,… is part of the poet's concept of love. She seems to be suggesting that union through love is only momentary and that it includes struggle for dominance. The release from individuality through complete union seems to be too open a position, may bring about such a thorough nakedness of soul as to threaten the very basis of the personality. (p. 30)

The [early love] poems are attempts to express the varying moods occuring during the course of a love affair with images pointing to psychological states and conflicts. Not all the poems dealing with love in this volume are successful. Some retain a kind of adolescent vagueness of romantic feeling, some strive for ambivalence of meaning which results only in obscurity or, conversely, over-simplification…. [But on the whole, these poems] convince as personal statements; they are believable as notations on personal experience. At the same time, however, they reach a certain objectivity because of the tone of directness amounting in most cases to a starkness. The images are not often over-developed; the poems themselves are generally short and to the point, as if the poet—and this is somewhat surprising considering both the age of the poet when she wrote these poems and the general poetic atmosphere in Canada when these poems were published—as if, then, the poet is determined to get to the root of her emotions in order to express them as openly and frankly as possible without making them too private in their connotation. (pp. 31-2)

Honesty and candour are essential components of the poems she wrote about her later experience of love in The Unquiet Bed, and Plainsongs. These poems, stemming as they do from her maturity as both poet and woman, taking into consideration her wholehearted concern about the position of woman in society and therefore the integrity of woman in a love relationship, are obviously for the most part more compelling statements than those in Signpost.

The poet prepares us for the section devoted to the love poems in The Unquiet Bed by closing the previous section, which as we saw earlier concentrated on the individual liberty of woman in personal life, with two poems ["Eve" and "Second Coming"] about the re-awakening of love within woman. And again she expresses this in an intensely personal manner. (pp. 32-3)

["Second Coming"] prefigures perhaps the insistence on physicality in the love poems which follow. But the titles of both these poems with their general religious implications also suggest that physical manifestations of love, however momentary, may include some spiritual meaning and revelation, and in some of the love poems the spirituality does arise from the physical presences of the lovers themselves, so that the ideas of separation, darkness, silence and distance in these poems take on weightier values because of the context in which they have been placed.

An insistent demand runs through the love poems, a demand that comes from her essential individuality but also a demand that comes from the masculine opposite partner. "Be woman", is the opening line of "The Taming" and in this poem being a woman means being submissive in sexual union but paradoxically that basic feminity has its own strength which will take away some of the mastery of the male. In a way "The Taming" is a poem that emphasizes the give-and-take of love in the strictest sense…. [The] sexual experience makes her face her essential self, her womanhood with both its submissive qualities and its strength. Through the physical experience comes a release from physicality. Woman is not to be considered merely as a physical piece of property. Love must give her freedom to remain herself even within the gestures of submission…. She wants the freedom to be part of a unity, a loss of one kind of freedom in order to release a true individuality. (pp. 33-4)

In spite of the ecstasies and freedom of love, in spite of the joy she experiences in rediscovering love at this point in her life … the poet acknowledges the terrors, failures, and paradoxes of love. She sees its creative joys but also its abysses, gaps, and silences. (p. 34)

Images of dream and sleep figure a great deal in the love poems in The Unquiet Bed. The poet sees the experience of love as something other-worldly and dream-like ("A Book of Charms"), something beyond words as in a dream ("The Dream"), but at times sleep and dream represent loneliness and distance, as in "The Vigil".

Some poems in The Unquiet Bed and Plainsongs attempt to describe the momentary blisses and fearful transient qualities of human love. "Old Song", in The Unquiet Bed, expresses in controlled and resigned tone the passing of love, the impermanence of a human relationship even though it may achieve harmony and union…. In a later poem in Plainsongs, "Con Sequences", Dorothy Livesay uses images drawn from nature to suggest the distances between lovers and also the growth and violent surge of love. (pp. 35-6)

Throughout the love poetry in The Unquiet Bed and Plainsongs Dorothy Livesay emphasizes the physical aspects of human love, so it is not surprising that the poem "The Operation" (Plainsongs), connects her experience of love and her recovery from it, together with a general reassessment of her situation of her life as she found it at that time.

"The Operation" opens with a sense of crisis. The poet has reached a crucial point in her life, this crisis made all the more emphatic in her mind because it happened after her tremendous experience of love…. (p. 41)

Just as she has to rely on herself to effect a complete physical cure after the operation, so she must assess her chances in the aftermath of love, which she now sees as "a sickness" which the lovers attempted to cure in many ways: by separation or even by physical indulgence….

The last section of the poem returns to a key image in Dorothy Livesay's poetry—a doorway—used generally as an entrance to new experience, as a release, a revelation or emergence into some new world. Here, as she stands in a doorway, she takes stock of herself…. (p. 42)

The sequence of the love poems in The Unquiet Bed and Plainsongs are the most candid revelations of the experience of love as seen by a woman in Canadian poetry. Some poems fall short of their aims because the poet seems more concerned with poetic theories about form and lining. Sometimes the structure of lining seem arbitrary, although in most cases the use of broken short lining together with rhyme, half-rhyme and assonance mirrors the changing and breathless quality of the experiences themselves, as well as rendering some sense of the spirituality of the experience, for the best poems in the sequence seem enclosed in suspension, caught in an ecstatic calm. At other times the poet mars a poem by making the reader too conscious of an image, so that it becomes for him a conceit, a rhetorical device that militates against the tone of honesty and directness in most of the poems. There is occasional overemphasis and repetition, even (though rarely) and indulgence in romanticism and sentimentality. But these are only minor blemishes on an otherwise distinguished set of poems. They are examples of the very best in Dorothy Livesay's later work in which she is not afraid to be intensely personal and frank because she is able to express her feelings immediately and yet objectively so that she herself is subjected to the appraising and critical apparatus she uses in her own poetry. (p. 43)