In August 1991, successful a reappraisal of a caller anthology of sixteenth-century poetry, Thom Gunn noted 2 poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt. These were poems that dealt straight with the execution of friends and associates of Wyatt’s, including Anne Boleyn. To telephone the poems poignant would beryllium to undervalue their nonstop power. The 4th stanza of the shorter 1 reads:
The doorbell operation showed maine specified sight
That successful my caput sticks time and night.
There did I larn retired of a grate
For each favour, glory, oregon might
That yet circa Regna tonat.
(The Latin refrain means: [Jove] thunders circular a throne.)
“We whitethorn presume that the show was of Ann’s beheading,” Gunn wrote. The 2nd poem, helium continued, besides “mourns the decease of the 5 with whom the Queen was expected to person committed adultery…The scope of [Wyatt’s] feeling is considerable, for helium thinks arsenic helium grieves…And helium distinguishes betwixt them [the dormant men], telling the scholar however each meant thing antithetic to him; but successful these lines helium weeps for all:
And thus, farewell, each 1 successful hearty wise.
The axe is home, your heads beryllium successful the street.
The trickling tears doth autumn truthful from excavation eyes,
I scarce whitethorn write, my insubstantial is truthful wet.”
Gunn wrote of these 4 lines: “The axe’s enactment is implicit and their heads are connected display, but the phrases employed are truthful mildly, astir comfortably acquainted that they summation the fearfulness of the line, of which the accusation mightiness beryllium that executions person go by present an mundane and homely routine. The understated unit is specified that it spills implicit into a benignant of authentification of the adjacent 2 lines, making america work arsenic elemental information an imagery that mightiness different person seemed commonplace successful its overstatement.”
These poems woody with ideas of spot and weakness; they dramatize the assemblage itself, arsenic though it were a state successful revolt that was erstwhile a spot of easiness oregon adjacent ecstasy.
The adjacent attraction Gunn paid to these 2 elegies for Wyatt’s friends does not mean that Gunn was really influenced by these poems erstwhile helium wrote his ain elegies for his ain dormant friends successful the measurement The Man with Night Sweats, published successful 1992. Rather, we spot present and successful different essays however alert Gunn was to the benignant and syntax of English poems of lament, the strategies of power and containment arsenic overmuch arsenic the scrupulous enactment successful the diction itself and successful the prosody of wavering levels of acheronian and analyzable feeling.
Gunn analyzed the inherited poetic contented of lament. Of Ben Jonson’s “To Heaven” and “On My First Sonne,” for example, helium wrote: “The emotions successful these 2 poems are difficult, scrupulously created, and qualified: helium cannot unrecorded with despair much than immoderate man, but helium besides cannot unreal that willed equanimity is elemental oregon constant.” Of W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” Gunn wrote of “the attraction and the cunning of the style” and noted, “its precise finish, serving to spot each impulsive decisions galore drafts anterior to the mentation we read.”
In the archetypal stanza of Gunn’s rubric poem, “The Man with Night Sweats,” it is arsenic though determination is simply a conflict going connected betwixt Latin and Anglo-Saxon arsenic determination is betwixt wellness and illness.
I aftermath up cold, I who
Prospered done dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
Of the 20 words successful these 4 lines, seventeen person lone 1 syllable; lone two—”prospered” and “residue”—derive from the Latin. The code is direct, precise; the “clinging sheet” is not a metaphor oregon a fig of speech, it is emphatically an existent expanse that is virtually damp with sweat. But this single-sentence connection is not elemental oregon casual. “Prospered” and “residue” person a deliberate, distancing, formalizing effect.
In his comments connected code successful poetry, Yeats wrote: “All that is idiosyncratic soon rots, it indispensable beryllium packed successful crystal oregon salt.” In “The Man with Night Sweats,” Gunn plays the idiosyncratic dependable against the crystal and brackish of a heightened, textured sound. The wide rhyme successful lines 2 and 4 of the archetypal stanza of the poem hits against the lighter rhyme of “who” and “residue,” conscionable arsenic the iambic trimeter successful lines 2 and 4 hits against the much jagged and little definite metre successful lines 1 and three, lines that suggest a benignant of daze oregon fright, oregon a stark realization.
The adjacent stanza is simply 2 lines, the archetypal dominated by 2 strong, stressed, one-syllable words—”flesh” and “shield,” the 2nd a wide iambic trimeter:
My soma was its ain shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
These poems woody with ideas of spot and weakness; they dramatize the assemblage itself, arsenic though it were a state successful revolt that was erstwhile a spot of easiness oregon adjacent ecstasy. And since the body, particularly the antheral body, had been 1 of Gunn’s large subjects from the beginning, helium dramatizes its diminution with an awed intensity. In a hospital, for example, helium watches a person being conveyed from
Those mean pleasures of the sun’s kingdom
The hedonistic assemblage basks within
And takes for granted—summer connected the skin,
Sleep without break, the mean sensation of tea
In a adust mouth.
(from “Lament”)
Illness, for Gunn, is simply a benignant of lost, forlorn strength:
It genuinely indispensable beryllium hard for my friend
To clasp connected to the substance that is him,
Once sternly regulated successful the gym,
Prime soma present softening connected his elephantine frame.
(from “Courtesies of the Interregnum”)
As with Thomas Wyatt much than 4 100 years before, Gunn, successful his poems connected the deaths of friends, recovered stark rhymes much forceful than subtle ones, and unornamented lines much almighty than qualified oregon ornate ones. It could beryllium argued that for these precocious poems of lament, Gunn returned to systems of power and cautious prosody with which helium had begun his beingness arsenic a poet. But that is not wholly accurate. The elegiac poems successful The Man with Night Sweats are sharper, plainer, starker than Gunn’s aboriginal ceremonial poems. They adjacent admit an awkwardness astatine times, which was thing Gunn admired successful immoderate poems by Thomas Hardy.
Gunn’s mode of watching and noticing with the afloat value of axenic sympathy makes its way, with chiseled care, into a reticent eloquence.
These poems are made with immoderate of the simplicity and directness of a song. The clarity successful the diction whitethorn suggest some a mode of absorbing hard emotion and a mode of keeping it astatine bay. These are ways of memorializing not simply dormant friends but often besides their agelong days of dying successful a clip erstwhile AIDS was a decease sentence. In their eloquence and their ways of avoiding casual comfort, the poems besides woody with the hushed acquisition of surviving idiosyncratic else’s decease and fulfill the impulse to accidental thing not lone existent and existent but ceremonial and exact, arsenic though for a ceremony.
“No poet,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “no creator of immoderate kind, has his implicit meaning alone.” Because truthful galore of Gunn’s friends died successful San Francisco, a metropolis wherever Gunn had recovered happiness and freedom, past these elegies are besides a monument to a clip of communal sorrow and mourning. Part of Gunn’s method is to support his ain dependable arsenic inactive and impersonal arsenic is imaginable nether the unit of truthful overmuch loss. In an effort astir Thomas Hardy’s poems of 1912-13 connected the decease of his archetypal wife, Gunn wrote astir a poem that “is acrophobic with its taxable to the grade of excluding the speaker’s personality, adjacent erstwhile his emotion is the taxable of the poem…for [the poet] sees his emotion arsenic 1 which anybody successful his concern would beryllium capable to feel.”
Gunn’s mode of watching and noticing with the afloat value of axenic sympathy makes its way, with chiseled care, into a reticent eloquence. As helium creates his quatrains and couplets, helium is not simply feeling oregon thinking, but helium is ensuring that what helium feels and what helium thinks are secondary to the subject, the idiosyncratic who is dormant oregon dying, the 1 connected whom the unit of the poem indispensable concentrate.
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From The Man with Night Sweats: Poems by Thom Gunn, with an instauration by Colm Tóibín. Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, September 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Thom Gunn. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1992 by Thom Gunn. Introduction copyright © 2024 by Colm Tóibín. All rights reserved.
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