Love
One of the poem's central themes is love. The speaker seeks to provide comfort and security to his female partner. Their love is demonstrated both in the familiarity of their domestic arrangement (the speaker's moving aside of the curtains, for instance) and in the intense description of their physical intimacy in the middle of the poem. The poem depicts this sentiment through the idea of roles that individuals fulfill for one another. This idea becomes underlined in the later part of the poem when the "grey" figure intrudes on their bedroom at night. In seeking to protect his partner, the speaker further shows the depth of his feelings. The poem seems to frame love as grounded in these actions.
Grief
One of the poem's other main themes is grief. In the opening stanzas, the speaker and his wife are clearly contending with some kind of tension in their relationship. The speaker's wife seems upset, and he tries to provide her with reassurance and consolation. In the later part of the poem, a figure appears in their bedroom and hovers near them. The speaker recognizes the figure as his wife's dead brother and tries to push him away, shielding her from the pain of his loss. In this regard, the poem seems to be about grief, in that it contends with both the speaker's wife's feelings and the speaker's efforts to take away or guard against some of the hurt she is experiencing.
Ghosts
Another central theme in the poem is ghosts. While the gray figure in the text is not explained explicitly, the speaker believes it is the spirit of his wife's brother. He materializes in a very supernatural fashion, looming over the bed as the speaker attempts to shield his wife from this figure. She is clearly still distraught from the loss of her brother. This scene highlights the impact of that pain as well as the speaker's attempts to defend her from it. In the context of the poem, the ghostly appearance of this figure seems to demonstrate how people from the past can "haunt" relationships. Creeley uses the idea of ghosts to illustrate this concept through imagery. Rather than offering an abstract idea of loss or pain, the poem uses ghosts as a figure for this tension in the relationship.
