The Poetry of

Thom Gunn -

A Critical Analysis
 Chapter-III

Chapter-III
The Poetry of Thom Gunn- A Critical Analysis

An English poet who has been a long time resident of California,

Thom Gunn combines a respect for traditional poetic forms with an
interest in popular topics, such as the Hell’s Angels, LSD and
homosexuality. English poetry was dominated by Thomson William
Gunn in 1960s and 1970s. Gunn’s poetry was associated with the
Movement and also with the works of Ted Hughes. After relocating from
England to San Francisco, Gunn, who became openly gay, wrote about
__
gay-related topics particularly in his most famous work The Man with
Night Sweats – as well as drug use, sex, and topics related to his
bohemian lifestyle. He won numerous major literary awards. Gunn’s
poetry, together with that of Philip Larkin, Donald Davie and other
members of the Movement, has been described as ‘emphasizing purity of
diction and a neutral tone.....encouraging a more spare language and a
desire to represent a seeing of the world with fresh eyes’. While Gunn
__
wrote most of his early verses in iambic pentameter a phase when his
ambition was ‘to be the John Donne of the twentieth century’ __ his more
recent works assume a variety of forms, including syllabic stanzas and
free verse.
Gunn’s career has been marked by constant evolution. While the
poet has said he considers Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement to
be apprentice pieces, according to Blake Morrison in the Dictionary of
Literary Biography, his 1961 collection, My Sad Captains and Other

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Poems ‘undoubtedly mark a turning point’ in his poetry. His early poetry
exhibited formal control of style to address modern subject matters and
caused him to be lumped together with the poets of ‘The Movement’, a
lebel Gunn has always despised as a convenient way for journalists and
critics to classify poets. The first part of My Sad Captains relfects Gunn’s
earlier, metrical style, while the second part transitions into ‘the new
phase of syllabics and tenderness’ according to Morrison. It is also with
My Sad Captains that ‘Gunn is for the first time attentive to the natural
world’, according to Morrison.
Another change in course came after Gunn had experimented with
LSD and the hippie counterculture during the 1960s as can be seen in his
collections Moly and Touch. The title Moly comes from the name of the
herb Ulysses used to prevernt Circe from turning him into a pig; and there
are a number of poems in the collection that describe Gunn’s LSD
experiences, but the work is also notable for marking the poet’s full
transition into free verse. In addition to moving from a classic, metrical
style of poetry to free verse, in the 1970s Gunn moved from addressing
love poems to women to frankly homosexual verses in Jack Straw’s
Castle. By the time of the 1982 publication of Passage of Joy, his poetry
was unabashedly homoerotic, but was also tinged with a melancholy air.
As Gay and Lesbian Literature contributor Michael Bronski wrote that
the sadness evident in some of Gunn’s earlier poems- the poet’s response
to the human condition- has evolved to reflect an acceptance of life’s
difficulties- tragedy touches the lives, albeit in small ways, of almost
everyone.

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When the 1980s brought the AIDS epidemic to the gay community,
Gunn lost many of his friends to the disease. His grief over these losses
is, according to many critics, profoundly described in his award winning
book the Man with Night Sweats. While some critics had complained that
Gunn had been ‘squandering his talent’ by writing about his drug and gay
experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, they were ‘obliged to reconsider’
that assessment with the release of The Man with Night Sweats. While
the verses contained here often describe heart breaking personal loss, the
poems are never self-indulgent and never moralistic. Celebrated poems
like ‘Lament’, ‘In Time of Plague’ and ‘Courtesies of the Interregnum’
have so much dignity along with their force that they do credit to the
readers who have made them something like classics already. His poems
have turned increasingly to the subject of morality. When he writes about
love it is more often with a sense of irony, as in his 2000 publication,
Boss Cupid. Gunn often ironically comments on how the god of love
often aims his arrows at arbitrary targets, thus causing poeple to fall in
love with unsuitable partners. The poet also writes about those things that
get in the way of love, and a number of the poems touch on grim subjects,
such as the poems: The Butcher’s Son, Troubadour etc. However in
contrast to the Man with Night Sweats which bleakly elegized the AIDS
epidemic, Boss Cupid usually manges a laugh in the face of adversity.
Thom Gunn is an important member of the poetic tradition in
British poetry that now has come to be known as the Movement. The
Movement poets were university graduates who contributed to the
university magazine. Robert Conquest was the first who made a leading

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representation of the historic Movement by editing two volumes entitled

New Lines (1,2). While this was an opportunity for the poets to be
recognized on a wide platform, this was also a moment of crisis for some
because they did not agree with the Movement ideology, theory or its
practice. Donald Davie, in his book ‘The Imaginary Museum’, is at pains
to see that those who are grouped in Conquest’s anthology had denied
their affiliation to the Movement. The Movement poetry of the 1950s was
a reaction aginst T.S. Eliot’s cosmopolitan poetry which was all
universal. It returned to the basics. Poetry had to go back to typical mode
where the subjective feelings and emotions predominate, while local
colour and texture relives, traditional folklore and wisdom in images,
symbols and metaphors, rhythm and meter. This is what the Movement
poetry is all about Gunn is largely identified by critics as adherent to
oddities, unconventionality and toughness in style and theme. These
eccentric demerits of Gunn are scarcely available in other
contemporaries. C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson offer a camparative estimate
between societies of the World Wars, “The Waste Land, the Cantos and
much of the poetry between the wars recorded the chaos of the post 1918
world. Since 1950 we live in a more dangerous world, threatened by
nuclear bomb.... Ted Hughes suggests the violence of modern society in
his images of animals like pre-atomic warfare. Thom Gunn in his
complex and sympathetic response to the teddy boys and tone up boys of
our age.”1 According to Cox and Dyson the poet’s social acceptance is
largest who speaks in conversational language on day-to-day life issues.
Some of the poet’s of the Movement contradict this theory by their

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practice in this regard. They use technical and special language to make
their poetry ambiguous. The Movement’s poetic atmosphere is ridden
with numerous paradoxes and contradictions which create an air of dust
and uncertainty. Clive Wilmer in the preface of The Occasions of Poetry
remarks, “He has made his name after all, the master of rigorously
traditional verse form, and he continues to excell in them, but he has
since become hardly less accomplished in variety of ‘open’ form and the
verse is no less shapely”2.
None other than Gunn inclined towards contemporary American
__
themes the black-jacketed modern biking heroes, vast expanse of
unpolluted landscapes, prostitutes flourishing in New York streets,
homosexuality, drug addiction and Elvis Presley like stage singers who
were very popular than any national hero. Gunn collaborated with his
younger brother Ander Gunn, a professional photographer in publication
of Positives, a new adventure done by writing poems on the photographs
of variety of tastes and merits. Gunn in his practice shows classic
temperament added with anarchic vigour sufficient enough to break the
fence of style wherever necessary. In selection of material of poetry Gunn
does not confine himself to a particular limit: “A sufficient variety of
forms (Contents) lay ready to hand, from the loosest ballad or song
meter”3. His creative efficiency can be witnessed in choosing the matter
and expressing it through appropriate vehicle. In the beginning of his
career he is classicist, middle phase is marked with experimentation in
free verse, and finally he returns to stanza form. He is a classicist at form
but experimental modern romanticist at theme. Sexual themes are dealt

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by Gunn in a very unconventional manner, that is, imposition of strategy

on two partners of game. He says ‘even in bed I Pose’; Gunn does refrain
from using Greek and Roman myths in quite contemporary context. The
American and British social issues are touched not in a prophetic but
realistic manner, in dealing with them the poet has participant’s
experience than mere onlooker.

The Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement

In 1954, the year after his graduation, Gunn’s first poetry collection
the Fighting Terms, was published. The Fighting Terms attracted
considerable praise. Gunn’s second collectin of verse The Sense of
Movement was published by Faber in the year 1957. This collection
celebrated contemporary culture. Poems contained in these early volumes
were written in Cambridge days as undergraduate youth wandering under
the force of physique and mind. The titles of the collections meanigfully
suggest the content and the spirit of the poems. As a student Gunn was
influenced by many authors like Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, and
Elizabethan prosperous lifestyle. Even some contemporary authors and
philosophers exercised creative influence on Gunn, major among them
has been J.P. Sartre.
Introducing Gunn’s first book Fighting Terms (1954), Anthony
Thwait argues :
“The poems in his first book Fighting Terms are mainly concerned
with ‘Love’ but ‘Love’ as a battle, political or military involving strategy
and hardhead discipline. The very title of this book in an indication of his

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manner and his preoccupation: the maner though and cynical; the pre-
occupations of life as a struggle, a ceaseless war of skirmishes across the
landscape of love”4.
Modern man’s life of which love is an indivisible part is the theme
of the first poem titled ‘Wound’. The poem pulls reader back to Greek
mythological Trojan War which goes on occurring every moment. First
and second world war and local wars are modern version of mythological
war of ancient time. Trojan War participants have sustained physical and
mental injury which, humanity keeps on compensating even today in
many ways. Keats's fascination for Greek myths has allured Gunn to use
the same in abundance in different post-modern contexts. The idea of war
havoc perpetuates even after the end of the second world-war. Gunn
wants to heal up the war wounds by love ointments but, society is so
scared of war strategy that even in love-affair it computes chances of
victory. Love has been rendered as an absolute commercial job, perhaps
this is the reason Gunn presents emotions in an intellectualized manner
like John Donne. Every participant of life-war wants 'Helen's place of
Joy' but, for some Helen is a thing to be possessed and exploited. The
sense of possessing Helen's beauty creates cosmic anarchy and total lapse
of love, followed by lurking of world-war. Gunn's own comment on
poem reveals another aspect, " - - - -a poem called 'Wound' - - - - -the
speaker is both - at one time Achilles the real soldier in a real war and at
another time the self who dreamt he was Achilles"5
Same as in 'Wounds' Gunn bifurcates protagonist's personality in
‘An Unsettled Motorcyclist’s Vision of His Death' for participating and

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realizing the life-war from different paradigm altogether. Gunn's

confession of Greek heroism and their postmodern relevance deserves
mention, "Returning to Hampstead at thirteen I read some Greek
myths”6. The changed context of society cannot cope well with static
references to Greek myths, perhaps therefore Gunn created characters
asserting, ‘I am myself, subject to no man's breath’. The idea anticipates
the poetic energy hardly kept under syllabic garb.
The similar idea of divided self and underlying energy is carried on
in 'The wind in the street.' The journey of self begins from unkonwn place
and time towards infinite future. The 'wind' stands for energy passing
from different stations of life in which' street' like narrow passages cause
‘wound’ on the body and mind of heroes participating in medieval or
modern-age wars. Blake Morrison's study of poem lacks larger paradigm,
"Wind in the Street describes a 'shop' (lover) which the speaker briefly
frequents before moving off, uncommitted to look elsewhere”7.
The absolute mission of modern man's life is to move round and
round like a bull, the idea is elaborated in the poem 'Round and Round’.
Gunn says “My want may modify to what I have seen" which indicates
narrow sightedness of our age. Gunn elaborates the metaphysics of man
and it's sliced selves, some are participating in the worldly affairs whereas
still others standing aloof like Tiresius. ‘The lighthouse keeper's world is
round symbolizes the paradoxical situation of modern man. We keep
'lighthouse' with us but ironically our world is dark. What we want is, ‘a
wife, a wireless, bread, Jam, a soap’ the sum of metropolitan city life-
style. In 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ T.S. Eliot comments what

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modern metropolitan gentry has measured, ‘it’s life in coffee spoon’

beyond which nothing remains for calculcation and achieving. 'The light
house' we carry with us all the time but in vain, having no validity before
worldliness heaped up. Anthony Thwaite's observation of Gunn's early
poems bears substance, "Self-discovery of more energetic and often more
brutal sort is one of Thom Gunn's central theme"8.
Self-discovery yoked with energy and brutality is need of the age
Thom Gunn belongs to. ‘Looking Glass' develops ideas through nature
images and creates contrasts on surface reality of metropolitan culture.
The title of very popular and debatable poem ‘Unsettled Motorcyclist’s
Vision of His Death’ and entire theme of 'Looking Glass’ are
understandable example of contrast issue. Gunn says like Wordsworth,
'Trees are in Leaves'. These examples and others show Gunn a conscious
writer of contrasts. The present poem contains 'children's laugh' and
'Eden' images which the modern heros have lost resulting in deserted look
of densely populated metros. Our life is a bundle of inexplicable contrasts
the both ends to which are beyond catch.
‘Tamer and Hawk’ describes history force which society accepts as
essential cause of cultural and civilization development. Culture,
civilization and history play vital role in contribution of man as he is now.
But Gunn wants to show the up side down in the present poem because of
absolute paradigm shift. History, civilization and culture are a collective
outcome of man's various contexts and activities. Gunn’s early love
poems (such as ‘To His Cynical Mistress', 'Carnal Knowledge', 'The
Beach Head', 'Tamer and Hawk', 'Captain in the Time of Peace) use

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explicitly or implicitly the language and pattern of war as metaphors for

the strategies of love. This gives to Gunn's early work a curious and to
some readers rebarbative moral flavour; relationships are seen in the
terms of maneuvers because all actions are based on decision of
existential choice.
‘Lazarus Not Raised’ extends the previous idea in religious
context. Man-religion relationship has got endless complexity rendering
man's identity blurred. It is based on biblical myth of Lazarus a brother of
Mary and Martha who was raised from death by Jesus. It is Jesus who
becomes mourner on his death and later the raiser. The poem like
previous one raises radical question of man’s relation with history,
culture, civilization and religion. ‘The Beach Head'’ applies political and
military strategy to reveal complexity of modern mood. The 'heart land'
of the country is watched by the captain as what is wrong and contrary
to his strategy regarding political and social welfare of the inhabitants,
Blake Morrison finds sexual angle in the poem, "Gunn it could be argued
never attempted to conceal disturbing aspects of sexual experience - - - -
critics could and should have detected the dark gothic elements in his
treatment"9.
Politics, religion, culture and civilization always function as anti-
human force subjecting man's energy to nothingness. Idea carried in the
following poem 'Here Come the Saint' elaborates the matter that 'body
and mind' relationship should be maintained. The villagers are
symbolized as 'body' and 'saints' as 'wisdom', In the modern time body
has got additional value than wisdom that's why things have reversed

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drastically. Balanced relationship between parts and whole is must as

Gunn maintains about poems, individuals and society.
After inculcation of saintliness and evolvement of wisdom, in the
protagonist comes desire of love culminated in 'To His Cynical Mistress',
a poem at root dealing with love theme whereas atmosphere depicted is
politico-military. The contrary to love atmosphere there is prepared
political mood by such words as 'compromise', 'impermanent', 'treaty',
'place' , 'nation', 'leader', 'assassination' which all manifest the practical
basic structure of modern political system. This is marked by betrayal and
infidelity at domestic and international level. Feeling of love emerges
when all above mentioned negative traits of personality are shunned only
then original identity of his mistress do emerge for reciprocation of love.
P.R. Kings' appraisal of the poem in discussion is worth recalling, "In
poems like 'To His Cynical Mistress' and 'Tamer and Hawk' he talks
about love in historic images which are meaningful in both contexts"10.
The word 'Love' has been most brutally distorted expression in
historiography and diplomatic context of period after second world-war.
Treaty, compromise, and alignment are frequently used terms to denote
developing understanding amongst nations, societies and people but what
reality reveals is a absolutely different story. Gunn as an honest and
impartial observer of world around laments, that 'The leaders calmly plot
tlle assassination', who could suspect that a staunch and honest Macbeth
can abruptly turn to wipe Duncan out for so trifle a cause. The practices
of assassination recorded in history are practical example of betrayal
between nations and lovers of today. The clarity of diction of the poem

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puts Gunn on the Movement track of poetry. An American poet and critic
William Carlos Williams has considerable share of influence on Gunn;
"If we wish to learn from William's achievement, we should mark the
clarity of evocation, the sensitivity of movement the purity of language to
realize spontaneity”11. Complex and opaque themes like love, political
and military strategy, clumsy manners of world diplomacy cannot be
expressed' in lucid manner as the poet did in the poem 'Lofty in The
Palaise De Danse' in which 'she' is lost whom the protagonist keeps on
searching, 'I tell/you you/ are much like one I knew before/that died'.
What is searched after is left behind as its simulacrum for illusion.
The concept of totality of knowledge and means of knowledge
have been discussed in the poem 'Helen's Rape'. Helen's body was raped
no doubt but her soul cannot be adulterated by whatsoever means. Helen
despite being raped bears the flag of Greek civilization. In a particular
context Helen's body is impure but her overall personality is not only pure
but purifier of coming generation. Gunn through the poem raises some
pertinent questions pertaining to civilization in general. As how Helen's
rape was last authentic rape? Does the war that follows her rape prove her
pure?
Helen's purity has been intact in the view of Greek as Thomas
Hardy maintains that Tess was pure even after violation of her virginity
by her friend. G.S. Fraser's critique of the poem is authentic, "At the end
of the poem Gunn brings in idea that only simulacrum of Helen was taken
to Troy and that real Helen was wafted to Egypt"12. Fraser and Gunn's
opinion of Helen's real identity can be compared with Sita whose original,

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self was kept safe by Lord Ram and that Ravana the king of Lanka
abducted simulacrum (shadow) of Sita. Indian civilization can never
ignore Sita's contribution; likewise Helen's share despite her molestation
is authentic in making of Greek civilization. The Waste Land typist lady
was not raped rather she agreed to enjoyed the sexual relation with her
boy friend in a routine manner as her husband's intimacy in terms of
carnal matter grew monotonous hence a change was sought by the lady.
Three other women of Helen's status were also violated of virginity
but, no furor followed like Helen's case. This fact proves deep rooted and
unified character of Helen in which purity of soul is centrally focused.
The poem certifies dignity and intact virginity of character:
Such an event when it takes place: Roman's stifling Sabine cries
To multiply and vulgarize
What when Trojan did with grace.
The poem that follows is 'The Secret Sharer' pervaded with mystic
and ambiguous atmosphere. Gunn's own view throws light on thematic
and structural aspects helping one to delve deep in the poem: "In 1952 my
first poem, to be published nationally, 'The Secret Sharer' was
broadcasted by John Lehman on his BBC Programme ‘New Sounding’. It
was still influenced by dead writers especially Elizabethans”13.
Elizabethan period and Shakespearean tragedies carry a lot of mysticism
regarding protagonists' life on stage. The words of the poem utter the
mysticism itself,
The curtains were lit, they were lit by doubt
And there was I, within the room alone

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In the empty wind I stood and shouted on

But what if the strange head should peer out.
The mysterious and vague atmosphere of 'The Secret Sharer' prolongs in
'La Prissonier' composed in traditional rhyme pattern and lucid diction.
Along with technical and fiction lucidity the poet succeeds in evoking
nebulous atmosphere. 'Now I will shut you in a box' where the 'you' is a
problem which the total poem explores although. The participants of the
poem 'I', 'You' and 'We' have specific identity in Gunn's poetic context.
Clive Wilmer's plea in Gunn's favour is praiseworthy, “His first person
like Raleigh's, or Johnson's or Hardy's is unquestionably that of a
particular person, but a man who expects individuality to be of interest
insofar as it is a quality that reader shares with him"14. The poem
delineates two different identities trying to possess the other on his/her
terms only:
And know where you are when I am not by
No longer needing the wonder and spy.
I may forget you at party or play
But do not fear I shall keep away
With any Miss Browne or Miss Jones.
Miss Browne or Miss Jones of the present poem with whom the
protagonist wants to elope for carnal desires is extended into the
following poem 'The Carnal Known'. After dominance of sexuality only
for sexuality here remains only 'heap of bones' as Eliot mourned for waste
lander’s life by stating that modern life is a 'heap of broken images'. 'The
Carnal Knowledge' develops the idea of sexual exuberance as singular

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end of life which deprives modern man from looking elsewhere for other
valuable experiences. Gunn says:
“In my early twenties I wrote a poem called 'The Carnal
Knowledge' addressed to a girl, with a refrain making variation on the
phrase 'I know you know'. Now anyone aware that I am homosexual is
likely to misread the whole poem, referring that the thing known that the
speaker would prefer to be in bed with a man. But that would be a serious
misreading or a serious misplacement of emphasis”15.
The two players of sex-game had different feelings of it, depending
on preconceived notion. Gunn assumes various personas in due course of
deep sexual orgy expressing identical views. Gunn says, ‘My thought
may not be/Like my body bare', and 'you know I know you know I know/
I know you know'. The refrain focuses the under current that both
participants understand the need and gravity of the deed in the life of
creatures. The protagonist's 'body' is bare but not the 'thought'. The
concealed 'thought' provokes the partner to shift focus from feeling of evil
to normalcy. Gunn writes, 'I prod you, you react. Thus to and fro/ we turn
to see ourselves perform the same/ comical act inside the tragic game'.
Blake Morrison's observation of 'The Carnal Knowledge' reveals very
crucial aspect, " - - - - - in Gunn's 'Carnal Knowledge' where the male
speaker is inattentive to his mistres's feeling"16. The concept of sexual
relation has got extremely casual attitude and, it is a market place
experience says Blake Morrison. 'I saw that lack of love contaminates',
Gunn says as an experienced visitors to sex sites, 'If you have tears

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prepare to cry elsewhere/ I know of no emotion we can share, your

intellectual protests are bore'.
Infidelity and betrayal has not only corrupted intimate privacy of
lovers and sex partners but contaminated the political and social life of
the modern world, the idea finds poetic elaboration in 'The Court Revolt'.
It is composed of six stanzas of five lines each. The atmosphere of the
poem is full of political conspiracy rotating on the axis of faithlessness.
Main concern of the poet is to highlight the problem of political
instability on account of internal breach. Gunn considers the issue as 'a
problem which is a problem of us all'. Politics is an important necessary
evil of human civilization from time unknown. The cheated king bears
following attributes which Gunn admires thus:
Nor was the doomed king either log or dead
Still active, generous, striking through the court
Suspicion never came to his head
Nor overthrown by system or idea
But individual jealousy and fear.
‘Lerici’ accounts the death of romantic poet Shelley by water. The
structure and culmination of thought is ineffective in the poem. What
brims out of the poem is focus on Shelley's indomitable poetic and inner
strength alienating him from group of milder romantics. The loose
structure and crunch of thought articulation destroys its beauty by setting
it off The Movement tradition. After an average poetry like 'Lerici' Gunn
sets a looking glass to explore his latent poetic energy and prosodic skill
in 'A Mirror for Poets'. Two milestones of English literature William

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Shakespeare and Ben Johnson have no identical impression of

Elizabethan era. Shakespeare and Johnson like versatile authors
flourished during this period. What Shakespeare's tragedies have
contained in their body reflect different story of royal and common man's
life. Gunn comments 'It was a violent time', the real features of the age is
'The ill-happening, wheels, racks and fires' of which Shakespeare
tragedies are stuffed with.' Comedy writer Ben Johnson prepared his
comedies on humorous material and showed happier side of society.
Thom Gunn celebrates beast life in 'A Kind of Ethics' and ‘Cherry
Tree'. Gunn reveals the hidden ethics in the life of tree and animals which
so-called civilized, cultured people lack. Donald Davie compares Ted
Hughes and Thom Gunn for likeness of subject-matter and almost
symmetrical metric pattern: "Thom Gunn very much of The movement in
his clarity of diction and syntax was more akin in some ways to Ted
Hughes in his fascination with restlessness and dominating impulse and
adolescent violence"17.
The second world-war anarchy as Gunn maintains can be
countered and curved by primitivism of beasts and trees by inculcating in
the personality of modern man. The poem says, 'No mediatory gives them
rules of conduct/ All day without a minister they hold/ primitive services',
We so called civilized human beings boast of our history; culture,
civilization and knowledge of different kind, indeed in the name of
recording knowledge of history etc., we accumulate our faults follies and
frivolities. Gunn says, - - they have no time for worship/ careless out of
possible beed may come/ A deniable good'.

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Life-death circularity has been alluring theme of Gunn's poem as it

is obvious from 'For a Birthday' in which Derrida's concept of
postponement of meaning is poetically applied. Words are 'signifiers'
what is 'signified' is various and uncertain according to Deconstructionist
theory of Derrida. Gunn's state of realization cannot be verbally
communicated, 'I have reached a time where words no longer help'.
Individually the protagonist has to undergo numerous despotic situations
like; 'They are gravel stones or tiny dogs which yelp/ Biting my trousers,
running my legs'.
Communication of message and its understanding are basically two
different stages of mind which can be better understood in the 'Incident
on a Journey'. Life and its multiplicity is a riddle in itself as P.R. King
feels, “------The Journey is to be seen as a metaphor for life. The poet
imagines himself steeping in cave on his long track through a harsh
landscape and he employs a Yeastian refrain (I regret nothing) and its
variation to describe a man in whom action is close and immediate
response to strong. This produces a wisdom that cannot be divorced from
the action”18.
War and allied experiences are largely used in early poems of
Gunn which after passage of some time turns to wisdom and
understanding in variety of protagonists. 'Incident on a Journey' has to
witness ghastly scenes; most filthy of them all is a 'Coloured wall of
animal blood'. Beastliness in man of today is frequently regretted by poets
of new generation. Gunn laments, ‘And coloured with the blood of
animals;/showing humanity beyond it’s span’. In brief Gunn wants to say

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humanity can be found anywhere but in human society. The repetition of

‘I regret nothing’ denotes the impregnability of modern sentiment.
The poet wants to shake off stagnant modern sentiment by
introducing movement, for that purpose he wrote The Sense of
Movement (1957), the second poetic collection under technical influence-
of The Movement poetics whereas thematically J. P. Sartre and Yvor
Winters supplied with poetic raw materials for Gunn. Gunn's own remark
about the second collection is helpful in delving deep the poem:
“The Sense of Movement then was a much more sophisticated
book than my first collection had been, but much a less independent.
There is a lot of Winters in it, a good amount of Yeats and a great deal of
Sartre. (Strange bed fellow) It was really a good work of apprenticeship.
The poems make much use of 'will'. It was favourite word of Sartre, and
one that Winters appreciated but they each meant something very
different by it, what I meant it was ultimately Yeatsian willfulness”19.
The first poem of The Sense of Movement is 'On The Move' which
contains energy, naturalness and contemporarity. Flying of blue jay and
swallows from bushes indicates inherent energy symbolized by,
'Scuffling' and 'wheeling'. It also incorporates contemporary images of
'motor cyclists' crossing through countryside making birds to fly from
their hidden nests in bushes. Thematically 'On The Move' resembles T.S.
Eliot's Four Quarters: "- - - - - - - -yet there are obvious broad affinities
between the patterns of argument in 'On The Move' and some of the
patterns of argument in Four Quarters"20.

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On thunderous sound of motorbikes is stirred the 'Spurting of birds

across the field' which are bound to behave as per their instinct. Gunn
says the birds 'are seeking their instinct' and 'their poise'. The sound
created by spurting of birds and motorbikes are 'approximate words'
having no obvious meaning in terms of civilized consciousness, however
Gunn wants to decipher some implied meaning therein. Nietzsche an
existential thinker of modern age comments on the nature and goal of
individual's movement. "The goal of movement for an existing individual
is to arrive at a decision and renew it"21.
The protagonists of modern age appear on stage of life in donned
personality, ‘gleaming Jackets’ , ‘atrophied with dust’ with and intention
to hear some meaning from meaningless atmosphere as Anthony Thwaite
suggests, "Their restlessness is approved because one is always near by
not keeping still. This is typical of what seems Gunn's philosophy - - - "22.
The modern man keeps repeating things even without reaching the
destination as Nietzsche underlines, " - - - - - but the repetition is life's
daily bread which satisfies and blesses. In repetition inheres the
earnestness and reality of life”23. For untiring repetition 'toughness' and
'hardiness' is necessity of modern age man's existence in the havoc
creating machine cult. Gunn's idea is apt to recall:
Men manufacture both machine and soul/And use what they
imperfectly control.
The conflict of attempt and perfection gives substance and
meaning to life which the next poem under examination 'First Meeting
With a Possible Mother-in-Law' elaborates. The being of 'I' is an object of

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search that is mother-in-law but 'without the benefit of knowing'. Attempt

for search of unknown person goes on endlessly signifying the real
temperament of life. Human relationships and worldliness collectively
create cumbersome atmosphere for any man however intelligent to
understand it in totality, argues Heidegger, the unintelligible world
constructed by personal experience in which man feels safe and at home
“ - - - the world of meaning is annihilated and he is plunged back into
sheer isness"24. The being in 'real self' and being in 'isness' are
contradictory situations creating illusion regarding search of existence.
Certain finer qualities which are dormant in personality need
devoted exploration to understand them is the subject of 'High Fidelity', a
small but reflective poem under discussion. In modern age the pious term
'love' is most degraded experience causing Love-affairs as means of
frustration. "Fidelity in love" says Gabriel Marcel "is attestation to being
therefore; to live in reflection the experience of fidelity unfolding its
implication is the most promising approach to the exploration of being"25.
Love as soothing experience is a distant dream for modern waste lander
as Gunn's autobiography reveals, “ - - - - -I never saw her again but that
was all to the good since I could now imagine her in whatever I wanted -
- - - - - -my walks on the health became longer and more melancholy”26.
The melancholy of love in the life of the protagonist is a perpetual
phenomenon no matter this is a girl or a city which the poet loves a lot.
'In Praise of Cities' carries the love-frustration game in microscopic detail
of loved one city. The poet says, by way of metaphors, 'dirt', 'moss',
'strangers', 'rejected side street' as parts and attributes of beloved city.

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Rejecting the good and bad sides of personality of an individual or a city

we cannot know the same in totality. Sartre’s comment is worth recalling
in this context, "world can be deduced from the consciousness not
because consciousness is prior and independent but because it comes into
the world as nothing but gives the world as there”27.
The poetic endeavour to realize 'Being' in midst of various
illusionary selves had led Gunn to cast a bird's eye view on inexplicable
paths of religio-social texture as 'Jesus and His Mother' presents. Jesus
Christ in this poem stands as the representative of society while mother
Mary as torchbearer of new generation. Mother delivers sermon to Jesus
which applies to all people of the world trapped in existential dilemma.
Mother and her sermon, Jesus Christ and people at large create a full
circuit of action and reaction which otherwise stands disconnected
resulting in personality split, the poem through the discovery of mother's
'being' tries to locate Jesus' and all's 'being' as Heidegger rightly held,
"Human existence is obviously indicated as the starting point; since we
are privileged in our relation to that; any metaphysics of 'being' must
itself be the product of human existence"28. General misunderstanding
prevails among religious people that God is object of adoration for the
fulfillment of religiosity. In fact, existential concept of man presses that
‘God does not want at all to be loved by us’. What then God desires of
human being (if there is least scope of God's validity in existential
discourse) is propounded in 'The Corridor' as symbol of channelized-
energy. Energy of Gunn flows wherever it finds crack in classical meter
pattern. The poem contains existential terms as 'key-hole', 'picture in a

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book' pressing the existence of 'watched' and 'the watcher.' The watcher
finds two gays engaged in homosexual relation unaware of being peeped
through key-hole. Gunn's own obsession towards homosexual
relationship is not only accepted but praised as better experience. Gunn
admits, "homosexuality even, in our life time, thought to be contagious;
many educated people believed at least until the first Kinsey report
appeared, that a simple sexual experience without a member of one's own
sex enough to alter the direction of one's inclination for good"29. The
identification of someone's existence in the mob is a perpetual process as
the poet expresses:
For if the watcher of the watcher shown
There is no distant glass should be watched too.

Will to remove obstructions of life is central creative force in Gunn

poetry which is voiced in 'Before the Carnival' composed in traditional
verse pattern. The poem again evokes Roman glory to contrast with the
modern world. Gunn’s poems like that of Keats has fascinations for
Greek myths and Roman grandeur in order to rectify the modern state of
life as G.S. Fraser sums up in his study, "Italian painting, California
scenes and characters, Greek mythology, French literature and philosophy
frequently give him the pegs to hang his poems on"30. The texture of the
poem communicates complexity in technique and meaning:
A sexual gossip with a doll like pout
He can not touch the objects of his stare:
A prodigal's reflections swimming there.

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The protagonist 'stares' something of his liking which he can

neither touch nor enjoy because of uncontrollable forces fractioning
always. Life of ours is manifestation of desires abandoned by resisting
forces. Freedom to achieve choices of life is ever unfulfilled as the poet
suggests, 'Loot in the attic, the unentered room: A naked boy leans on
outspread knees/ of his tall brother, lolling in costume/Tights vests, cap’.
The poem depicts unbridgeable vaccum existing between man’s desire
and it’s fulfillment. The general condition of human beings in life is like
mercury frequently changing shape and direction is voiced in Human
Condition’. It is epitome of man’s modern mindset.
Now it is fog, I walk
Contained within my coat;
No castle more cut-off
By reason of its moat:
Only the sentry’s cough
The mercenaries talk.
Gunn's characters are ever on move no matter unsettled, fogged
coated or misdirected by mercenaries. They ceaselessly project their
'being' and 'freedom' to show individuality not ready to subside before
untamed circumstances. Energy contained in their 'being' assert as Gunn
voices, "I stay or start from here: / No fog makes more or less/ The
neighbouring disorder." The 'disorder' of time and place validates the
creative potential of Gunn learnt from second world-war and aftermath.
The drastic consequences of war recorded in the mind of European
society is so long lasting that very few like Gunn can resist. The sweeping

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impact of the same in social disharmony is expressed in ' A Plan of Self-

Subjection'. It is a counterpart of previous poem in content and style. Man
despite enough consciousness can fall prey to circumstances as strife
between self and system in on ceaseless move. The poet laments on that
stage of human life where man indeliberately slips in pit for no known
reasons:
I circle because I have found
The tracing circle is useful spell
Against contentment, which comes on my stealth.
Because I have found from the heaven sun can
Scorch like hell itself
I end my circle where I have begun.

The characters of Gunn take birth every moment in one matter or

other hence, development of personality is an endless practice, keeping in
mind the idea the poet has written 'Birthday Poem' which incorporates an
unknown 'you' to teach Adolph and Fabrice as young European people to
face challenges of life. Adolph symbolizes physical energy whereas
Fabrice stands for intellectual power both combined can withstand every
turmoil which life can erect. Gunn voices what 'you' as teacher and
Adolph and Fabrice mean by being taught:
You teach Adolph a hair raising escape
Out of the round cell of his love's eyes.
Show him a huge world with a violent shape
You teach Fabrice to sit and analyze.

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Gunn as in the previous poem has evoked a tutor and his taught - a
beautiful girl named Mme une Tele wandering lost in an unidentified
wood. She and her tutor are passionately attached to each other, as she is
'a trifle ill/with idleness but no less beautiful'. Repetition of 'I' sound
enhances artistic charm of the poem. The scenic beauty of the poem is
worth recalling, 'The sun is distant and they fill out space/sweet less as
watercolour under glass'. Tutor and taught wander lost hither and thither
aimlessly in the meantime her husband comes across:
Towards the pool by which they lately stood
The husband comes discussing with his bailiff
Poachers the broken fences round the wood.
Sudden appearance of husband catching his wife red handed with
tutor takes reader back to Eliot's typist lady who used to have sexual
satisfaction with her lover during absence of husband. Search for identity,
creation of being, anticipation of fortune and actualization of love and
sexuality have been common area of fascination for Gunn as the
following poem 'The Wheel of Fortune' tells. Like anything human
fortune is a very mysterious and mercurial subject, of which no one can
predict with certainty. Priests, worshippers and professional prophecy-
makers create still thicker haze on fortune of men. Gunn ironically
comments on their unjustified intervention in the territory of nature. 'The
Deeper they dream, disorder comes'. The main theme of the poem is the
evident rift existent between, human mind and omnipotent nature. The
confrontation of man with nature in the name of science, religion or
anything only leads to eradication of man. Man must learn tendency of

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adjustment and balancing with violent nature as 'Lines for a Book'

reveals. Gunn says:
It is better
To go and see your friend than write a letter;
To be a soldier than to be a cripple.
To take an early weaning from the nipple
Than think your mother is the only girl.

The central thesis of the poem under analysis is 'time and space' on
the platform of which life dances and meaning keeps on changing as per
perception. Being soldier and crippled, girl and milking mother are
juxtaposed conditions of life but according to time and space their roles
are changed. Gunn has made his name as an unconventional tough writer
observes Blake Morrison, "Gunn's early works are renowned for its
toughness"31. The poem that follows is 'Elvis Presely' based on hero
worship cult; the subject has been very much close to Gunn's poetic
creed. Elvis Presely an American stage singer has exercised lasting
influence on audience across the continent. Blake Morrison's words on
the poem convey substantial meaning, "Gunn praises both traditional
heros Alexander, or Mark Antony / or Cariolanus whom I most admire;
and modern figures like Elvis Presley who adopt a posture for combat”32.
The ‘Inherited Estate’ epitomizes Gunn’s past and present, his
experience of England and aspirations for America as dream land. Gunn
having dedicated the poem to Mike Kitay reveals the poem related secret:
“Also at Cambridge I met Mike Kitay an American, Who became the

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leading influence on my life thus on my poetry. It was not easy to speak a

relationship so long lasting, so deep and so complex and nor of the
changes it has gone through”33.
Since the beginning of his literary career Gunn has hidden desire to
acquaint with American society, culture, landscape, and rudiments of life-
style which in Mike Kitay finds fulfillment. A new American heritage
Gunn wants to actualize by dwelling about. He further focuses, “….my
life insists on continuities between America and England between free
verse and metre, between vision and everyday consciousness”34. For
Gunn England had been once upon a time a great country which now is in
ruinous state, on the other hand America is heading towards all-round
sublimation hence promising estate which the poet wants to make content
of his poetry. Both countries have respective characteristic as the
following lines show:
Typical product of intelligence.
That lacks brute purpose-split, disintegrate
And, falling with their own rich weight
Litter the slopes, record of expense.
What the poet thinks of America:
And generation of ganged village boys
Have used as fort and ammunition those
Droppings of fashion you explore today.

Gunn’s content and style of poem are original and innovative even
in conventional poetic material like 'love' 'marriage' and separation as is

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clear in 'During An Absence'. Shakespeare's immortal creation Romeo

and Juliet could not realize their love mainly due to parental obstruction.
Montague and Capulet have generations old familial fray whereas Romeo
and Juliet quite ignorant of parental enmity have developed 'otherworldly'
kind of affection which family and society fail to understand. As the
enmity between Montague and Capulet rises so the love grows between
Romeo and Juliet.
Synthesis which Gunn derives from the poem suggests that sense
of affection is natural and essential whereas enmity only reaction and
momentary: 'each love defines its proper obstacles/ our frowning
Montague and Copulate/ are air not individuals'. Existence of airy enmity
depends on circumstances whereas individualistic love of Romeo and
Juliet is nature supported. In the life of love separation is indivisible part
exposed by 'The Separation' to be analyzed. Since hitherto Gunn has been
under the sway of The Movement ideology and undergraduate mentality
so wrote the poems on classic tradition of style. But 'The Separation'
anticipates Moly and Touch themes and style dealing mainly with an
'uncertain', ‘illusion’ and deceptive identities, 'when I could almost touch
you were no clear’.
Thom Gunn's first two collections deal with 'movement' because of
'fighting terms' and condition of post-war people. War-ravaged Europe
had no immediate or ultimate aim to its people except an uncertain
‘toward-toward' where they are destined to 'move'. The philosophical
essence of war-ruined sentiment has been articulated in J. P. Sartre's
novels and theoretical document which Gunn followed by admiration.

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The main concern of Gunn as a thinker-poet is to remove the state of

inertia and stagnation from the life of post-1950 world. Human
predicament is partly man-made, which Gunn hopes can be smoothen by
developing rational observation of the evil rather than bringing in rotten
thoughts of outdated religiosity.

My Sad Captains and Positives

Gunn’s career has been marked by constant evolution. While the
poet has said that he considers The Fighting Terms and The Sense of
Movement to be apprentice pieces, according to Blake Morrison, his 1961
collection My Sad Captains and Other Poems ‘undoubtedly mark a
turning point’ in his poetry. His early poetry exhibited formal control of
style to address modern subject matters and caused him to be lumped
together with the poets of The Movement, a lebel Gunn has always
despised as a convenient way for journalists and critics to clasify poets.
The first part of My Sad Captains reflects Gunn’s earlier, metrical style,
while the second part transitions into ‘the new phase of syllabics and
tenderness’ according to Morrison. It is also with My Sad Captains that
‘Gunn is for the first time attentive to the natural world’ according to
Morrison. My Sad Captains deals with the melancholy of protagonists as
they kept their movement on against the prevalent fighting terms. Gunn
belongs to a society which does not permit a fighting man to exist, only
identity-surrendering man can live in his isness which Gunn's protagonist
cannot accept therefore, uneven and uncompromising conditions have
emerged around them to fight against resulting in sadness of captains.

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They are captain of their ship to steer it in the direction of their choice
and freedom, ignorant of what comes out as gain. To them life is a
movement and struggle having no end to feel 'final' and absolute. Thom
Gunn points out:
“In 1961, I published My Sad Captains, the name of the title
having been suggested by Mike. The collection is divided into two parts.
The first is the culmination of my oId style- metrical and rational and
may be starting to get a little more human. The second-half consists of a
taking up of that human impulse in a series of poems in syllabics”35.
Gunn has tremendous creative energy which first two collections
could not put to use on account of maintaining prosody and obsolete
Movement ideology. My Sad Captain is a confluence of metrics, syllabics
and so far derailed creative energy. Gunn remarks aptly, "writing in a new
form almost necessarily invited new subject-matter"36.
The first poem which is also the title of the collection “My Sad
Captains" debates man's relation with history which is traditionally
known as compilation of serialized events. History is an account of mere
chronology of events which undermines individual existence of man. On
the vast canvas of history man is often undermined to situation as Karl
Jasper and Gunn repent, “The sciences of man of which history is a type
are meaningless, a dust of unrelated facts, unless they are more than
sciences for they require comprehension of ideas and appreciation of
ethos”37.
In ‘Restignac at 45’ a vital bifurcation takes place, one Restignac
himself and the waiter, who fills the empty glass with wine. Restignac

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claims all knowledge and wisdom which surrounding suffices as Gunn

cites. ‘That I know from having done/child and I survive.’ Frequent
application of ‘I’ in the poem focuses the urgency of knowledge Gunn
has had at the age of 45 as T.S. Eliot too once called himself an aged
eagle maintains Frederic Grubb “T.S. Eliot described himself as ‘an aged
eagle’ at the age of forty-two. Gunn in his middle thirties with the
advantage of not exactly suffering from ‘slyness’ appear fascinated by the
glum futility of Restignac at 45”38.
A settlement without life and energy is a place of cremation as T.S.
Eliot lamented in The Waste Land where people confront 'a heap of
broken images'. In 'Byrnies' Gunn focuses on the 'safety with virtue of the
sun', which the poet wants every indweller to inculcate in life to prepare
the good map of a city. The poem dealing with 'order', 'system', harmony'
and 'discipline' is invariably composed in classic pattern in imambic
pentameter. The city does not exist anywhere in the world but in the
creative imagination of the poet with definite contours and topography.
At this stage Gunn's fascination towards American city-landscapes has
grown visible particularly of California, New York and San Francisco
which, by the time of composition of the poem has taken shape of
allurement. But 'A Map of City' in concept and form has no proximity
with Gunn's real attraction to these places, in the words of Gunn 'Paterson
is a town in New Jersey', but the poem is also about a man called
Paterson’ the town is to be seen in terms of a man, the man in terms of a
town and it becomes clearer and clearer as it progresses that man is
Williams himself. Gunn learned from Wiliiam Carlos Williams the

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technique to write about city in terms of man and reverse. But Map of
City is a blueprint which Gunn’s mind wants to realize in themes and
contents.
The theme of the next poem ‘Innocence’ is a question as how to
inculcate and retain the virtue in the personality despite various sinister
situations. Wordsworth esteems ‘innocence’ as the divine trait which
certifies our origin from God for certain. In ‘Innocence’ the poet draws a
picture of what man and city should be like after holocaust. The theme is
an extension and experiment in the unknown territory of knowledge
which drug is going to reveal.
The consciousness of human mind operates like a snail, whose
movement cannot be easily noticed. This is elaborated in the
‘Considering the Snail’ written in a well conceived thought pattern.
Shakespeare compares a school going child’s pace with that of snail in As
You Like It, so is the life of man whose beginning and end is impossible
to trace. What we know is a fragment of time eternal. Symbolically
‘snail’ embodies soul’s eternal journey from unknown past to unknown
future. The movement of snail and that of an individual is always
perpetual having no material goal to achieve and stay at; rather it is bound
to an indefinite, unrealizable future. The joy of movement is not in
attaining a specific station but in movement itself, as an existential
thinker maintains, “The goal of movement for an existing individual is to
arrive at a decision and to renew it”39. The poet is surprised at the slow
and steady perpetuation of snail, ‘what power is at work’, ‘what is snail’s
fury’.

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In creative trance the poet ventures in an unknown locale using as

if unpossessed limbs can be witnessed in 'Santa Maria del Papolo' which
resembles Keatsian objective manner of 'Odes'. In the tradition of Keats,
Browning and Yeats, Gunn also uses Italian painting as artistic motif
which can be read in the contemporary context. The present society wants
to be master of all visible worlds but finds 'nothingness'. The acute
existential dichotomy we confront is desire of all but gained nothing,
except convulsion. The place poet visits is an example af man's mirage. 'I
see how shadow in the painting brims/with a real shadow'. The meaning
hereby conveyed is sarcasm on our life which is a shadow of shadow
twice removed from originality. Aristotelian concept that 'Tragedy is an
imitatian af action' is well manifested in this poem revealing fake
temperament of our life. Merle E. Brown has made subtle study of double
nesses in modern poetry and society: "Another feature of Gunn's work
which divides it from The Movement is its interest in existentialism, a
philosophy which is often thought to be related to romantic
individualism''40.
The protagonists af My Sad Captains are generally destined to hug
frustration in an attempt to project individualism, freedom and will. The
individual and societal scenario is reversed as Gunn poignantly tells, ‘that
firm insolent/young whore in Venus’s clothes/those pudgy cheat’. The
paintings suggest different states of mind condition of society. ‘In
different groom’ and ‘Soul becoming Paul’ effectively indicate upside
down condition of modern age. Some scene are too ugly to be worded,
Gunn complains ‘O wily painter limiting the scene’. Gunn under the

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format of poem raises many serious but unanswerable issues which better
can be summed up in the words of Sartre; “the age when the meaning of
the question of ‘Being’ has been so completely concealed by knowledge
and lost sight of in the perspective of an active civilization that does not
make sense any more”41. Mere social and cultural recognition does not
help of ‘Being’ it demands more. What outcome people embrace in
monotonous activities of life is ironically indicated ‘Resting by
embracing nothingness'. John Press has made commendable evaluation of
this poem, " - - - - that nothing exists, that this abstract concept is only
chance, change and flux which man must endow with contour and
purpose”42.
My Sad Captains basically deals with existential dilemma that is
debate of being and non-being, existent and non-existence, search of
identity leading to loss of identity. Thom Gunn explores still deeper
corners of human life in coming book Positives (1966) for which newer
and conducive poetic skills were developed along with philosophical
depth. Positives is a result of collaboration of Ander Gunn the
photographer brother and has a lot of freshness to share with readers.
Life, as Gunn's brother has understood in Positives is amalgamation of
sweet and sour, tears and laughter but most strikingly an endless journey
to an indefinite destination.
Picture arranged in Positives are natural as well as logical as the
first picture of an 'Infant' is unworded yet providing a huge room for
readers to say / write / feel. The supportive hand with a time machine
indicates the fleeting nature of infancy. The concept of time as we

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understand is passage from innocence to mundane worldliness. The idea

is conveyed in the following picture of a little bigger baby, holding a 'toy'
with opened eyes, 'Toy' embodies worldliness inducing emergence of
greed. What Gunn writes of the picture is riddle 'She has been a germ/
and an animal; even now/she is without hair/ or sex'. The underlying
riddle dismantles numerous questions so far unanswered by any branch of
human discourse. First question coming up to mind is fixation of priority
between classification of sex or innocence.
Neill Powell had made worthwhile study of theme and style Gunn
applied in Positives, “The value of Positives is that Gunn has learned to
write flatly, undemonstratively and loosely in a metrical sense”43. In
Positives Gunn’s style as Powell comments is flat, undermonstrative and
loose in metrical sense exposing dormant sides of life, which from classic
parameter cannot be adequately measured. Even infancy itself is a
mysterious stage which cannot be comprehended from any definite
mindset. Knowledge gathered from sensual mode or otherwise is only
partially true. Nietzsche an atheist philosopher expresses anti-hope view
considering bleak nature of modern society. Not only adults but children
too are destined to embrace hopelessness and despair on account of
disparaging surrounding, “Hope is an alluring fruit which does not satisfy
memory. It is a miserable pittance that does not satisfy but repetition is a
daily bread which satisfies and blesses”44.
In Positives the poet blends reality and existential romanticism
which makes life worthwhile despite endless desperation. The poet has
opened fresh area of poetic exploration in theme and technique as is

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evident form the first line of the poem, 'In a bus it is nice to ride on top /
because it looks like running people over'. Varieties of hurdles are
incapable to stop the life which Gunn has set on perpetual movement
having almost no concern of its output. Movement in our life is aim and
gain maintains Gunn. In the following picture four students are watching
'Pop of rain' which symbolizes display of natural energy inherent in boys
too. Gunn's latent energy finds outlet through various channels
throughout life which he sums up in the following words, "I had a happy
childhood, because of change in father’s job we moved around the
country a lot at first, but we finally settled down in Hampstead. I played
with my friends on the heaths fording streams or skirmishing with strange
children”45.
Gunn and peers fully conscious of their atmosphere watch react
and assimilate whatever locale offers. Thus they define their identity and
vitalize their being in relation to surrounding by 'smelling creosote, and
the musty rot of wood'. The companions stand in 'present' but
simultaneously creeping in mysterious 'future'. Gunn’s phrase 'bodies, are
increasing in secret society' reveal what children are likely to embrace in
impending moments is unpredictable, our 'body' for the time being can be
supposed to be stagnant but 'mind' goes always reflecting in past and
future unpredictably.
The sense of quench and fulfillment has no room in the writing of
Gunn. Enlarging the doctrine of movement, expansion and assimilation
are underlined in carnal relationship of male and female which nature
manifests in myriad of ways. Nature does not keep at standstill, see the

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view of Gunn. They start to cross the road / life swelling in them, but still
/ contained’. What seems lifeless now turns full of impetus in no time can
be seen around in nature and children alike. Gunn echoes Wordsworth in
feeling energy flow in nature and child. The photograph that follows tells
of ‘bees’ symbolizing untired women always culling pollens for honey
which energetic heroes have opportunity to enjoy. Gunn’s figurative style
prophesies his bending towards romantic and existential issues.
Impact of Keatsian sensuousness and Swinburn’s selection of soft
syllables can be witnessed in the following lines of Gunn which portrays
a delicate young lady walking in the picture:
She trembles slightly: her face
Feels hardly strong enough
For the weight of white lace
Which seems to overwhelm her.
Gunn not only excelled in describing 'tough' and 'tardy' things but
proved accurate in painting tender and generally ignored aspects of
objects, as if he is making a flawless commentary. The poet notices, 'shy
smile', 'fair and fragile' and 'white lace' which all attribute to outer lineage
of her appearance what more the poet explorer wants to know is her
struggling personality verses standing world. Her physical charm,
according to Gunn is subject which everybody wants possession of. She
is perpetually engaged in process of attracting and getting attracted which
validates energetic existence of the lady. To love and being loved is one
of the basic instincts which nature has endowed all creatures of them man

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is front line, as Sartre points out, "In love, it is liberty of the other that I
want to assimilate or to posses as liberty"46.
Handsome lady well dressed and ornamented is greedily observed
by a spell bound, hanged breath person. The scene recalls Wordsworth's
'Tintern Abbey" wherein nature watcher's blood circulaticn is suspended,
in either cases identity and existence of subject and object get
automatically proved. Existence and identity in relation to the world and
society though ever in contention animate and rejuvenate each other.
Gunn's emphasis is on significance of phenomenon of universe of which
man’s life is an outcome better understandable than anything else.
Man's life and nature as Gunn maintains are interconnected in more
than one ways but the world man manufactures only serves as material
facilitator. Controversy of material world with man as a burden is the
theme of the next poem and picture. A lady is presented carrying
household materials on head symbolically telling imbalanced equilibrium
between man and material. According to existential thought-pattern man's
existence precedes anything which defines man's life. Married and social
life turns topsy-turvy and zigzag as the protagonist utters, 'In a family
there is/ a sense of many doing many thing all different/ absorbed in
different rooms'. Clumsy and opaque ways of life pose challenge for
individuality. In European social setup individual existence always
combats with surrounding which always lurks to dominate and
overshadow. The idea of occasional poetry has been welcomed by Gunn
in his critical essay, "yet all poetry is occasional, whether the occasion is
an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war or, whether it is

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some sort of combination of the two"47. Birthday celebration, declaration

of war or infidelity in love, someway or the other empower the
protagonists existence and identity in relation to the world as stage of
multiple roles. Some critics, accordingly have pointed out that Hardy's
some poems are academically appreciated only on account of structural
and thematic badness which Gunn too has tried to emulate in his own
creative career. Natual roughness of Gunn’s certain poems align him to
Hardyian poetic fashion underneath which fresh and pure meaning flows.
The picture shows a man sitting in a chair visibly musing over
things not available in the room. This practice of reflection anticipates
what Gunn is about to do in Touch and Moly poems under the influence
of drug he learnt use during his stay in America. The protagonist
transcends the limit of time and space to peep into unborn future. The
fascination of picture dominates prose-poetry which fails to invite any
interpretation. What Gunn utters factually is 'a dry foul taste in mouth'
and 'American leather of the sofa'. The poem is a dry description of
room's belonging lacking poetic diction and imagination.
Many pictures in Positives are related to working London people.
They are picturized with absolute objectivity and unromantic angle,
accordingly countered by poems of Thom Gunn. The man raising pick to
break stone on ground is pivotal in the lines that follow :
His own weight divided
Fairly between his legs
Right hand lower, left hand
Higher to bear the pick down

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On the inanimate rubble

Which must be broken.
The protagonist wants to break inanimate rubble for transforming
the piece of land into greenery of plants, as the natural desire of
constructive human mind. Since the characters of Gunn’s poems have
been facing acute identity crisis right from beginning therefore, all their
deeds are testimonials giving shape to them.
Man is not an inanimate object of material capable to live in
whatever condition but an organic, thinking and responsive entity. Man’s
existence and identity is largely dependent on what he projects under the
garb of his different personas. Some poems in Positives are as mysterious
as life itself. The photographic and poetic depiction of a vacant restaurant
is almost handled by a single hopeless waitress. She symbolizes
individual’s isolation in the large crowd of world. What she feels of
work-place and herself is suggestive of :
The liver and onion is off
So is golden sponge pud. So
It appears are the customers.
Customers make restaurant alive and waitresses engaged. The store
condition of restaurant is unable to attend customers so they move here
and there searching for another restaurant and hence are tired. The search
of destination by moving has been favourite theme of Gunn but his
protagonists never stayed for ever at any such destination. According to
Gunn life is an endless journey, occasional pause is another start. The

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poem’s pictorial equivalent tells something different. The introductory

words factually tell sweepers monotonous work routine :
I have closed my brief case, dropped my pick, stopped serving
pints, thrown down broom, finished fighting; it is tea-break.
The main concern of almsot all Positives poems is to record the
nature of passing of time on the faces and doings of the protagonist.
According to Gunn nothing stands still in the monarchy of nature of
which man is an intelligent part. The old man face shows contours of time
in wrinkled skin but he keeps breath running till the natural death arrives.
The face of the protagonist is a living reservoir of knowledge and
experience. The nature has scripted 'an ambiguous story' on his wrinkled
face which ordinary reader cannot read. Gunn has keen eyes and ears to
read and listen the letters and sounds created by nature passing from an
unknown destination to another. What nature and time produce in cryptic
manner for us can be comprehended as the poet suggests:
As the ability to resist
Annihilation, or as the small
But constant losses endured.
Meaning of life always stands in a state of suspense and doubt
which can be read only between the lines by a differently experienced
person. Unlike John Keats, Gunn has peculiar fascination in drawing
invisible line between death and life. The present picture and poem is
briefed in parenthesis, '(Please destroy in the event of death.)' All
amassed materials and life get finished the moment death reaches
however the spirit of life outlives.

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The doctrine is rendered in pictorial equivalent as two old men are

sitting on wooden bench in a green park. One of them 'feels a breeze rise
from the Thames', as if the other agent is sans feeling capability in the
same location. The act of feeling, sensing and perceiving in the same
condition varies from man to man. Gabriel Marcel puts the idea thus “the
act of sensing, feeling and perceiving is an act of receiving not merely
acted upon, but giving the hospitality to the object opening oneself to it
with all that one has, an act which is creative in a less powerful degree
but in the same sense as the act of artist. My senses are witness to
Being”48.
The next poem on the picture of a choosy woman is continuation of
previous parley. She is standing in front of a deserted house concentrating
at disposed off rotten things. She can wisely differentiate what to accept
and refuse as far as household belongingins are concerned. The garbage
shown are, ‘fell feathers’, these all constitute an ‘infected composed’. Her
life supporting condition, physical surrounding and perceptional
capability are on perpetual confrontation with one another. In this process
of eternal battle her existence is shaped out and distinguished from the
rest of the people. The same lady is seen 'poking around the rubbish',
which recalls motor bikers' attempt to derive meaning from the meaning
thunders of motor bike. Whether they succeeded in their attempt or not is
not known but this lady as Gunn says, 'cannot find what she wants'.
In the prime period of life Gunn’s protagonists appear extremely
engaged in different jobs but Gunn like Donne and Keats realizes the
force of death breaking through different material activities. The present

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poem and picture showing a lady on death bed elaborates her ambiguous
feelings of past and present:
Her flesh has felt
A chill in her feet, a drought in her groin
And at last she asks about the
Impact of death 'will it hurt?
Some concluding poems-pictures show man's disappearance from
the stage or life, after a period of excessive engagement in material
activities. What is point of focus today drops silently to dust tomorrow is
the nature or time. Despite all cruel facts of life man cannot abandon
living life. The desire to cope with odd situations make man's life worth
celebration, this is what Gunn’s has done so far. In the coming volumes
of poems celebration of man continues in different modes and manners.
During Gunn's Cambridge days (around 1950) J. P. Sartre had been
indisputable source of intellectual energy for dons. The poet's ordinary to
creative life owe great debt to Sartre-group philosophers. Post-war
European mentality was almost damaged, as science-politics combination
has cast havoc on society beyond expression. Gunn's study and adherence
to Sartrean philosophy in Positives explores hidden corner of life. Life is
not only speed, movement, adventure but patience, expectation and
adjustment with outer and inner strength, Gunn propounds this concept of
life in Positives. Man has lost a lot spiritually and materially during the
second World War carnage but what he has found in himself is rather
more valuable. Gunn in no case however justifies the war devastation.

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The positive energy built inside us is the target Gunn wants to hint at by
all these poems.

Touch & Moly

Thom Gunn’s next collection of verse Touch was published in the
year 1967. This collection can be taken as the poetic record of perceptual
hindrances in dealing with life problems. ‘Misanthropos’ is the largest
poem of all dealing with hypothesis as how this world came into being,
what kind of cosmic phenomenon occured to destruct it and how culture
and civilization developed thereafter? Such a situation is extremely
critical for ‘Misanthropos’ protagonist to relate present with past and
future. No developmental model is left out around to imitate for further
reconstruction. ‘Misanthropos’ is divided into XVII parts of which ten
parts are dedicated to ten directions (the entire cosmos) and remaining
seven chapters symbolize seven days of creation. Thus, the poem deals
with cosmic re-creation which has been sunk in holocaustic flood. In re-
creation of the cosmos no helping tool is survived except memory.
Hence, the only survived protagonist has to reflect his memory back and
forth to find even faintest marks of decayed civilization, 'Misanthropos' is
epical in size and theme about which the poet says:
“There was one poem I was writing on with which I had a different
kind of problem, though it turned out to simply be a matter of scale. The
poem is about a man who supposes he is the last survivor of the massive
global war about his surprise on seeing from the hill where he sits a group
of refugees approaching on the plain beneath”49.

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The titles of sub-poems reveal the tone and meaning of total

'Misanthropos': 'The Last Man', 'Memoirs of the World', 'Elegy on The
Dust', 'The First Man', 'The Last Man' surviving the massive global war
becomes the 'The First Man' of would be generation. He attempts to re-
create the civilization only on the faint memory of his past days. The
memory compels the protagonist to lament for what he has witnessed
which got destroyed in global atomic war. Only a heap of dust is
remainder before the protagonist to seek any sign of civilization. Gunn's
concept of time insists that it is present which validates past and future.
The Misanthropos protagonist stands on a peak of mountain, single
available shelter after massive destruction. The entire region his eyes can
run is a kingdom of 'brown and green silence', indicative of flooded
region without life. With utter curiosity he watches every nook and corner
to connect his memory with, so that he can connect his present with past
and future for further creative mission. The structural beauty of entire
‘Misanthropos’ lies in the fact that each poem echoes the other in terms
of theme and technique. No part of poem creates jargon like feeling,
“Each of seventeen poems of which ‘Misanthropos’ is composed echoes
the other, and all of them inter inanimate each other. But if one would
sense the surge the feeling that gives life and unity to the whole, he must
attend the interlinking of Thom Gunn’s mind”50.
‘The Memoirs of the World’ depicts the role the protagonist had in
the ruined civilization of which he is the last token. He had been listening
bird’s song in evening while collecting fire-wood to avoid cold bite. The
following lines offer a better picture of nature :
Which coloured, similarly white-grey black-eyed

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Ironed and slabbed concrete of a sentry post

With its cold orange. Let me live one second,
Not now, not now, not now.
The landscape he wants to observe in detail is multi-coloured,
swiftly changing in new shapes hence proving difficult to tame. The poet
and the protagonist want to compose the scene they encounter but in the
process of composition it goes uncontrollable. About the field sense-data
is insufficient feed back and their rendering in words on page is still
scanty. This is what Gunn has felt about his personal and creative life
problem. The problem pertaining to numerous roles he performed are
enumerated in the following lines:
Nobody in the street could see
If my eyes were open.
I took them off for movies
And sleep.
Again:
Yet as I lingered there was,
I noticed continual
And faint and indecision
A hunger in the senses.

In a state of uncertainty and martial upheaval society has lost

control over itself. Lack of fine virtues in the life has created a state of
mental infirmity. The poem under consideration 'The Goddess' is
composed of well measured four stanzas of six lines each. The metaphor

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'eyeless fish' denotes lack of wisdom and foresightedness. The people of

modern age are materialist having no larger plan for future. Christian
societies have elaborate system of ethics which modern people fail to
practice. The protagonist is 'on her way upward' but in the mean time
'evil' obstructs the way leading to a 'dark brook'. The good and evil goes
on struggling in life to overrule the other. The scene that follows is
suggestive of prevalent social nature:
And the soldier by a park
bench with is great coat collar
up, waiting all evening for
a woman, any woman
her dress fight across her ass
As bark in moonlight.

Anti-humanistic atmosphere of world is a kind of

confinement obviously speaking nothing but expressive of mental
agony under which entire civilization suffers. Merle E. Browne in
the general study of Touch observes: “Touch in contrast contains
major poetry in which words and experience interact. Since Touch,
the tenuous holding of words and experience intensify relation
which have been snapped, and the words are textured so as to hold
them aloof, and fastidious away form non-verbal experience which
even so is evoked and set-afloat”51.
Words and experience interaction means that they have some
equivalent but total experience cannot be worded fit to understand.
Similar idea Gunn has expressed in 'From the Highest Camp' where

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the protagonist's experience is beyond verbal expression. The

following lines tell what Gunn feels:
Last, the prisoner, he
is pale, he walks through
the dewy grass nodding
a goodbye to acquaintances,
There will be no speech.
And We have forgotten his offence.
The experiences protagonist gathers in interactions with
nature are capable of suggesting a lot, but woes are partly hinting at
practical experience. In the process of bringing knowledge and
experience a little closer to poetic Language Gunn proposes to
make innovation in theme and style.
‘Taylor Street’ and 'Misanthropose' unanimously deal with
mistaken selfhood and perception. The protagonist watches an
unidentified person roaming in street whom he wants to accompany for
pleasure sharing. After coming across behavioural dilemma
'Misanthropos' protagonist shrinks to self and wants to remain there for
unlimited time period. Going out and coming back in original self is
perpetual practice which the poet wants to substitute by realizing
unlimited potentiality of self forever. 'The warmth/of his big
crumpled/body anxiously cupped by himself in himself’, admits Thom
Gunn. So long as extroversion is concerned no one can properly
concentrate on 'thinginess' as it demands cupping himself in himself.
Gunn values Dick Davis's fashion of self-immersion in gathering subject

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for his verse. "And there is the constant use of images to do with deep
and dream being the type of self-immersion"52. This state of personality
empowers the protagonist to beat path even in odd conditions,
‘Unmoving/but carefully getting a little strength from the sight of the
passers bye.’ Fragmented perception makes life quibbling on the beats of
time, consequently diminishing the value inherently kept in personality.
Recurrent theme of touch can be well understood in the words of a
protagonist:
You turn and
Hold me tightly, do You know who
I am or am I
Your mother or
The nearest human being
The problem of perpetual identification has been key to almost
every poem as P. R King held:
“In the poems of this volume we see the protagonist experiencing
sense of touch, not just physically out also in the sense of 'getting in
touch' with others sympathizing with and understanding someone beyond
oneself. Although the sense of the other is vague and shadowy in many of
the poems it does nevertheless provide the first experience at the feeling
level of the protagonist's response in his fumbling search for genuine
communication”53.
P. R. King’s notion applies to every poem under consideration. The
characters, scenes, materials and composite surrounding of which the
protagonist is an outcome, has to interact, cope and revolt in order to gain

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substantial cognizance and wisdom. The propor poem Touch illustrates

the existence of the protagonist, ‘a superficially/malleable dead rubbery
texture’. Lack of adequate cognizance of world leads to greater confusion
in the life of man which Gunn wants to focus in these poems. This style
of Gunn has put the poem in phenomenological garb:
“It is being assumed if two things on which one is aware are
entities of different natures, they must be 'intrinsically different', i.e. must
have detectable qualitative differences, that they could not be members of
series in which there is a sensible continuous transition between the
two”54.
The protagonist wants to collect knowledge of what is around and
vice versa but nothing finally dependable is achieved. The movement ‘to
embrace all and finding nothing' is the perpetual dilemma of man's life. It
is very difficult job to locate the identity of the protagonist in many
poems of the collection. The Poem 'Confession of a Life Artist' is an
epitome of life and poetry which Gunn wants to accommodate. 'Whatever
is here, it is/material for my art’, beautifully tells Gunn's notion of poetry.
The cosmic vision of 'Misanthropos' is reiterated in following word of
poem:
Later the solar system
Will flare up and fall into
Space irretrievably lost
For the loss and or the life
There will be no excuse, there
Is no justification.

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The creations of nature, poet and man are subject to gradual decay
as invisible time is always on work to make and mar it simultaneously as
it is game of see-saw. Gunn very beautifully offers the phenomenal fact
of universe:
Prophecies become fulfilled
Though never as expected
Almost accidentally, as if to conform
Some alien order.
The area of poetic subject varies from philosophy to routine-life;
the point is clear in the following observation of Gunn:
When my girls are off-duty
I load them with chocolates
But cannot for one moment
Possess red hair like hers, fresh
Cheek or be strong like hers
Or a wasteful heart like hers.
Reference to modern girl's off-duty and, their corporal
characteristics hint at what these girls look like and what the poet can not
imitate to be. The corporal appearance and the existence are two edges in
between the two we hang our life. As per existential argument “Personal
existence is launched between nothingness and nothingness that is real,
everything is absurd, the impossibility of existence is possible, nothing is
necessary"55. In 'Santa Maria del Papolo' Gunn describes human nature
as ‘embracing nothing embracing all’. The final gain of wordly business
is ‘nothing’ well elaborated in the next poem ‘In the Tank’, composed in

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classic pentameter, rhyme scheme being a b a b. The protagonist confined

in tank (world) has to rely on second hand knowledge as the region
belongs to Felon. Existence of the protagonist and Felon are dubious in
the poem.
As we know singular great feature of Gunn's poetry is yearning for
exploration. This is the centrality of 'The Pierce Sheet', on similar theme
was composed 'Unsettled Motorcyclist's - - - -'. This ends in symbolic
seventh room filled in with 'sun light' as to show path of exploration.
Every room the protagonist discovered is well decorated with the
paintings of soldiers. Gunn’s obsession with military references is
evident from every poem. Keatsian exactitude and appealing capability to
senses is available in the following words:
Some stand there as if muffled from the cold
Some naked in it the wind round a roof
But armed their hostlers as if tipped with gold.

The instinct of heroic discovery is peculiar trait of Gunn's poetic

character. The world can be rendered meaningful by outer and inner
exploration. Our life in the present world is like a painting or statue only
meant for decoration being looked at. Fossilized life of modernity has no
impetus of selfhood except artificial addiction by which the poet is able to
explore new poetic horizon. The collection Moly (1971) is largely written
after taking LSD, and acid as Neill Powell has also noted in his study of
the poems, "Many of the poems in Moly are concerned with drugs but the
poem has also a mythological aspect which gives the book its title. One

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may as well note however, that Gunn has used drugs much earlier and
that at least one and probably more of the poems in My Sad Captains
were composed after taking mescalin”56. Moly is a herb capable to
transform man into animal or modifies the protagonist half man, half
beast. This alchemy of moly on protagonist has symbolic significance
which Gunn applies in enlarging area of observation.
A brief survey of Gunn’s poems shows that he has been explorer of
landscapes, existence, identity and self. In Moly poems Gunn wants to
delve deep into inifite possibilities of soul by consuming drugs. Drug
addiction for Gunn is a search of unkonwn, “It is a reach into the
unkonwn and adventuring into places you could not have predicted,
where you may find yourself using limbs and organs you did not known
you possessed”57.
The collection Moly begins with 'Rites of Passage' composed in
five stanzas of six lines each rhyme scheme being abc abc, about metrical
composition Gunn admits the impact of drug as a facilitator. The poem
rotates on 'I' as pivot around whom there exist two personality father and
mother. No character is explained in detail. The protagonist believes in
divine planning of human life, "All planned before my birth/ for you old
man, no other". There is a transformation taking place in poem as the
effect of drug. The sailors are being transformed into pigs and man into
woman. It is a search of completeness in the world of incompleteness.
The words of poem itself explain the type of transformation taking place
on the protagonist, 'skin that was damp and fair/Is bark like and feel
rough'.

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Before publication of Moly Gunn has been an onlooker but turning

point came in his poetic career after Moly. Extrovert observer turned
inside the matter as the fact is obvious in 'Rites of Passage'. The poem
indicates how Thom Gunn, the observer has become deep plunger into
the 'thinginess' of matter, he simultaneously makes outer and inner
journey with the help of drug. About the significance of drug Gunn
himself has a revelation:
“There were the fullest years of my life crowded with discovery
both inner and outer, as we moved between ecstasy and understanding. It
is no longer fashionable to praise LSD but I have no doubt at all that it
has been of the utmost importance to me both as a man and as a poet. I
learned from it, for example a lot of information about myself that I had
somehow blocked from my own view. And almost all of the poems that
were to be in my next book Moly written between 1965 and 1970, have in
someway however indirect to do with it”58.
The horned protagonist is searching for Moly herb in order to
transform sailors into pig, his various beastly selves into a single man, so
that he can collect variety of experiences in the sweeping impact of LSD.
The transformation of various characters into other has ontological
significance. Single self-experience is always shorter than multi-self
experience for Gunn, "This is a principle which has seemed self-evident
to some philosophers, though they have not succeeded in formulating it
that it implies just what they want it to imply”59. Gathering animal
experiences for Gunn is a rewarding job, as it enriches his totality of

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experience. The four lines of the poem expose what the protagonist had
experienced:
Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,
On cringing dribbling dog, man's servile friend
Or cat the prettily pounces on its meat
Tortures its hours, then does not care to eat;
Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass flea.

Similar idea is discussed in ‘For Signs’ where the poet attempts to

create balance between existence of the protagonist and multi-faceted
environment, ‘In front of me, the palings of fence. Throw shadows hard
as bard cross the weeds’. The image of moon tells cycle of life once
coming to forefront and then disappearing in sky. This contrasting
situation of life and style of Gunn is noticed by Wilbur Scott, as he is
quite consciously a writer of contrasts. Contrast is that virtue of life
which makes it worth thinking and combating for. Nature images used in
the poem offers clarity in life situations as ‘moon sinks in vacancy’
beautifully suggests man’s life in society.
Nudity has been a burning topic in aesthetic debate which for Gunn
is search for ‘innocence’ naturally inbuilt in us but currently missing. The
composition of the poem became a reality tells the poet himself:
“------ on a day I was walking on a hill going down to the pacific,
which it met at a narrow, partly sheltered beach, I came to the beach form
some bushes and was confronted by a naked family-father, mother and
small son. The son rushed to me very excited, shouting ‘hi there, hi there’

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in his shrill voice---- I mentioned it to some friends that evening and to

others the next, and the day after that I realized that I wanted to write a
poem about the naked family”60.
The poet observes three naked persons of a family on rocks, all in
harmony with total scenic beauty. In poems where the protagonist-nature
combine play equal role, Gunn presents a stage, then actors and theme.
This fashion is followed in ‘Santa Maria del Papolo’, ‘Lazarus Not
Raised’ and ‘Three’. The title ‘Three’ is itself proved as there are three
persons who symbolically indicate past, present and future. The
harmoniously mixed with nature are characters:
All three are bare
The father towels himself by two grey boulders
Long body then long hair
Matted like rainy bracken to his shoulders.

Writing poems is an attempt to compose uncomposable

experience which along with Thom Gunn many linguistic philosophers
have felt. ‘From The Wave’ raises protagonist’s identity question in front
of nature's onslaught. Here man is transformed to accommodate with sea
waves; 'The marbling bodies has become/Half wave half..... man'. The
problem of perception, Gunn faces, is to bifurcate the protagonist from
sea waves. To suit the wave's movement Gunn uses liquid and soft
syllables:
It mounts at sea, a concave wall
Down-ribbed with shine

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And pushed forward, building tall

Its steep incline.
The poet tries well to render nature phenomenon in appropriate
diction letting no doctrinal intervening. The protagonists surfing the sea
waves are sometimes visible and invisible as the following words reveal:
They poise their weight
With a learned skill,
It is the wave, they intimate
Keeps them so still.
Identification of the protagonist with surrounding coupled with
behavioural attentiveness inculcates ‘The Garden of the Gods’ of which
P.R. King’s view deserves categorical mention, “It creates mystic sense
of divinity a magical nature which is a rich profusion of delights and the
source of fecundity in man”61. The central image in this poem is ‘Eden’ to
be found in inner realm of mind. The ‘Eden’ is always to be nurtured and
promoted otherwise danger of night darkness is there around:
All plants grow here, the most minute
Growing from turf is in its place.
So bright that some who see it
Think there is lapis on the stems
Think green, blue and crimson gems
Hang from the vines and briars.
‘The Flooded Meadow’ debates the idea of life and death as two
inevitable state of physical existence. The poet sums up the poem by
saying ‘between the banks’ stands the life. Any moment flood water can

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inundate the island where life is safe for the time being. ‘The Discovery
of Pacific’ reiterates emergence of finer qualities by being in intimacy of
nature. The poem illustrates the spell of natural beauty on the protagonist,
‘fall to the ocean where it led they went’, meaning hereby that their ‘will’
and desire have lost power before nature:
Kansasa to California. Day by day,
They travelled emptier of things they knew
They improvised new habits on the way
But lost the occasions, and then lost them too.
‘Sunlight’ is a rare example of thematic and stylistic excellence,
moreover it records clear inspection of objects in scientific way :
Water, glass metal, match, light in their rapture
Flashing their many answers to the one
What captures light, belongs to it captures:
The whole side of the world facing the sun.
What light captures and what captures to the light.
While being part of metros of America Gunn got fascinated to
professional girls which is evident from ‘Apartment Cats’. The ‘Cats’ are
indicative of professionalism in girls and nature’s proactive creative
agent. The cats have exceptional quality of perception and adroitness
which equally applies to city bred girls in terms of hunting joy seekers.
‘Their eyes get wild, their bodies tense. Their usual prudence seemingly
withdraws’. The advance capability of human knowledge has turned
perceptual accuracy doubtful as opposed to natural behaviour of cats,
'Sniffing around my shoe - - then they wrestle'. 'The Roof top' like 'The

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Confession of a Life Artist' offers drugged poet's cosmic observation

though confined in a small room where from he sees 'gardens being filled
with sunlight'. The protagonist's observation and that of Gunn is
homogeneous intending to grasp the world:
Perception gave me this:
A whole world bit by bit,
Yet I cannot grasp it
Bits not an edifice.
In the identical fashion of Dick Davis many poems of Gunn have
been designed in which the poet is absolutely involved, “The diver a man
sinks from the known day to the bottom of the sea and confronting the
treasure-wreck, 'hesitates/wreathes his body in'. It is an action of total
involvement”62. The cosmic phenomenon though seen by all is the least
understood by a few:
Long webs float on the air
Glistening, they fall and lift
I turn it down, the gift:
Sun fragile lights can tear. :
x x x
Petals turn brown and splay
Loose in a central shell
Seeds whitening dry and swell
Which 'light' fills from decay.
P.B. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Gunn’s
‘Misanthropos’, ‘Merlin in His Cave’ and present poem under discussion

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‘The Rooftop’ philosophically elaborate nature’s law which we people

misconceive as creation and destruction. From domestic to universal
issues we witness multiplicity of perception which, we ignorantly
attribute realistic or non realistic observations; as the following study
reveals:
“Let us start with double vision, which Austin described as a
baffling abnormality. We have seen why double vision might be
considered to pose a unique and intractable problem for a Realist. The
‘two sense-date’ of the bottle are indistinguishable in quality. They are
sensed in different directions and there is no possible ground for choosing
one of them as (really) the bottle’s front surface”63.
The creative process through which Gunn gets translated on page is
equally applicable to all poems. The drug effecting Gunn’s creativity is to
be found in ‘The Street Song’ where the poet sings:
My grass is not oregano
Some of it grew in Mexico
You cannot guess the weed I hold
Clara Green, Acapulco Gold
Panama Red, you name it man,
Best on the street since I began.
The ‘Street Song’ protagonist under the drug glee ventured heaven
and hell, the experience of the same like Fulke Greville he wants to share
with others, “The possibilities of hell in human mind and anticipation the
hell after death is constant themes of Greville”64. The drug provoked

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another poem ‘The Fair in the Woods’ presents a platform as symbol of

world.
All day a mounted angel came and went
Sturdily pacing through the trees and crowd,
His horse glossy and obedient;
Points glowed among his hair: dark haired, dark browed
He supervised a God’s experiment.
Gunn’s controversial poem ‘Listening to Jefferson Aeroplane into
the Polo Grounds, Golden Gate Parks’ entails shorter poem than the title
itself:
The music comes and goes on the wind comes and goes on the
brain.
Through ‘wind’ and ‘brain’ the music of life passes which the critic
offers like this ‘Is this the famous blowing of mind?’. The brevity of the
poem Gunn learned from John Donne’s least quoted poem:
Nurse oh my love is slain, I saw him go
O’er the white Alps alone.
The LSD loaded poem ‘The Natty Bumpo’ deals with the problem
of known becoming unknown which the slippery mind of the poet wants
to retain:
These were the fullest years of my life crowded with discovery
both inner and outer, as we moved between ecstasy and understanding. It
is not longer fashionable to praise LSD but I have no doubt at all, that I
had somehow blocked from my own view.

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What is handy in the poets mental territory goes far off and the
uncalled for spontaneously takes in, is a kind of miracle taking shape very
often with the poet. Once in France roaming around the dusty road “----- I
experienced a revelation of physical and spiritual freedom that I still refer
to in my thoughts as revelation”65.
‘Tom Dobbin’ is an experiment in verse-libre which Gunn has to
make perfect and polished in ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’. The protagonist Tom
Dobbin is half man half animal. The poem is free from punctuation
properly anticipating ‘Geysers’ and showing abrupt but spontaneous
behaviour of Tom Dobbin as Gunn says, ‘there is the one/and at once it is
also the other’.
Phenomenologically Touch and Moly poems can be better
understood by the statement: “He tells us that our verbs of perception
‘see’, ‘hear’ etc., cover only achievements, observational success. He
describes such verbs as achievement words. He writes that a person
cannot win a race unsuccessfully---- so a person cannot see incorrectly”66,
stated by Mundle. The problems of perceptions felt and expressed by
Gunn are pertaining to real life problems of men. Irony of human life lies
in the fact that he known the least of his own life of which he is an
evident owner. By these poems Gunn wanted to reveal the intrinsic
mysteries of human life.

Jack Straw’s Castle and The Passage of Joy

Jack Straw’s Castle was published by Faber in the year 1982.
Poems of this collection fall under American influence. The poems

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mainly deal with contemporary subjects in Jack Straw’s Castle. Yvor

Winter’s poetry workshop trained Thom Gunn practically as what poetry
is and what not. In this collection, Gunn’s use of British prosody for
American subject matters is remarkable. Major contemporary American
poets William Carlos Williams, Gary synder, Robert Duncan and James
Merill have their bit of influence on Gunn’s theme and style. American
landscapes, singers (Elvis Presley), black-jacketed boys and Edmond
__
serve as symbol of ‘toughness’ and movement the basic ingredients of
his poems.
The very first poem of the collection 'The Bed' is all about two
persons seen in sexual engagement. 'The garden is snowbound' and
'branches are bowed down' of the snow load. The archetype of 'Eden' is
indicative of quality of the protagonist's character as the following
description reveals:
We lie soft caught: still now it is dome
Loose-twined across the bed
Like wrestling statue, but it still goes on
Inside my mind.
Right from the earlier poems the sexuality and related activities
have been similar to war and strategy as the poet hints, 'Even in bed I
Pose'. The character calculates his opportunity of success in the game of
sex along with nature's picturesque beauty. "- - -he sees Winter’s poetry
as a matter of exploration discovery and understanding"67, cites Wilbur
Scot. Gunn's exploration of inner and outer world leads to larger
understanding and wisdom as ‘The Night Piece’ explains. In the journey

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of ‘wisdom’ fog comes in as the source of interruption where visibility

goes zero as the poet feels ‘Close me, make me its own’.
In the poems of Gunn and Ted Hughes there are urgent desires of
wild energy capable of defying identity threat. In 'Sparrow' Gunn offers
an atmosphere of life consuming cold which a very small bird sparrow
dares to combat. Ted Hughes's ‘Hawk Rooster' and Gunn's 'Tamer and
Hawk' celebrate the wild energy as life saving device in the world of
sharp divisiveness. The poets plead favouring the difficult life of sparrow,
'Sparrow needs some change', feels the poet; further he sympathizes with
the Sparrow's anguish:
I stand here in the cold,
In a loose old suit bruised and dirty
I may look fifty years old .
But I am only thirty.
‘The Outdoor Concert’ is designed in thematic and stylistic matters
like many of Touch and Moly poems. The poem presents dilemmas of
'knowledge' verses 'knowable' as W.B. Yeats says 'how can one know the
dancer from the dance'. The lines that follow reveal the inkept secret of
the poem: 'The secret/ is still the secret/ is not proposition: It's in finding/
what connects' the man with music, with listener'. The total intention of
the poem is to bridge the gap between seeing and understanding the
world. - - - - - that the poetry is an attempt to grasp, with grasp meaning
both to take hold of it in a first bit of possession and also to understand, I
certainly do pretend that I ever do completely possess or understand, I
can only say that I attempt to''68.

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After seeing, possessing and understanding the world there comes

the light of wisdom that is the theme of the poem under analysis 'Bringing
to Light'. An image of 'ancient city' which is lit by the 'light' of wisdom.
In the words of the poem the 'ancient city' appears like this:
Power, chunks of road, twisted
Skeletal metal, clay
I think
Of ancient cities of bringing to light,
Foundation under the foundation.
‘The Idea of Trust’ incorporates modern life paradoxes as
Shakespeare has said 'Security gives way to conspiracy'. In modern times
'Trust' is very easily cheated as no body finds room to doubt, is the central
thesis of the poem. 'Trust is an intimate conspiracy' feels the poet as
socio-political behaviour of modern time proves. Why a crooked and
immoral idea seized a transparent poet's mind, here is the answer:
“When Pretty Jim stole from his friends and I heard about old
definition of Trust he had made a few days before 'an intimate conspiracy'
I puzzled until out of my puzzlement I wrote 'The Idea of Trust'. I like
this poem because in it I ended up with more sympathy for him than I
started with, consequently writing it minutely altered me, advanced my
understanding in one small area”69.
The real life event led Gunn to compose a poem on very crucial
aspect of human behaviour. Once the 'trust' is established between the
two, the opportunist one can stab the back of innocent one. 'I see him/

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picking through their things/at this leisure with quite secret smile/
choosing and taking - - -
Jack Straw's Castle though written largely on Moly pattern is
radically different as P. R. King notes in his comparative evaluation, "In
this book (Jack Straw's Castle) a new freedom has been acquired. The
divided self (Moly) may not be entirely heated up but at least the part of
the self which is conscious, detached and willed - - - - - -as if something
beyond its own boundaries"70. Gunn's enlarged sentiment and
consciousness included experiences not only of human beings but of
'snail' 'dog' and 'hawk' which all help formulate his life - principle - 'I am
being what I please' and 'I am no man’s breath' like assertions.
The poem ‘Fever’ is an overdose experience of acid as the poet
himself recalls, “ - -a straight couple took me to my first gay bar the
Black cat. It excited me so much that the next night I returned there on
my own”71.The acid takes back to childhood days where Gunn finds
himself as an infant in the lap of mother, “ - - - - - the great sweep of acid
is over, I cannot unlearn the things that I learned during them. - - - - - - -
we glimpsed the trust, the brotherhood, the possession of innocence, the
nakedness of spirit is still a possibility and will continue to be so”72. The
state of trance is interrupted by customers coming in and exiting the bar
which the poet visualizes as the world full of hustle and bustle of people.
America has always been a dream land for Gunn to be part of, the
dream came to be true. As a naturalized citizen of America he inculcated
very awkward tendencies to go in dreams by consuming intoxicants.
Drugs and memory help Gunn to connect present with past and future,

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reality with romance and above all war experiences to transcendence

unexplainable. “Memory is means of renewal, and for Williams anything
that renews is an instrument for the exploration and definition of new
world.”73 Ontologically the life itself is a dream which the poet explains
in the poem ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’, and in ‘Geysers’ an unpredictable
nature of life is symbolized by long and short waves of ‘Geysers’.
Sometimes geyser goes silent as if there is no movement.
The serene and innocent fascination of nature the poet wants to
externalize in 'The Baby Song' the first segment of 'Three Songs' The
baby keeps pre-birth memory intact as a source of divine glory. The
baby's cry as Gunn interprets implies, ‘why don't they simply put me
back! where it is warm and wet and black?' The pre-birth comfort is mute
and perfect as compared to pangs of post-birth discomfort. Gunn never
finds solace in expressing objects of outer world; he hankers after
unspeakable as the present poem does. Dick Davis' style seems similar to
that of Gunn, "some of the poems experience awaits meaning and it does
not come. In another ‘childhood’ experience awaits, and the waiting, the
tentativeness, the expectancy are the subjects”74.
The second part of the poem is 'Hitching into Frisco', deals with
post-birth activities shown by images of 'truck', 'jail-house' and 'hotel', the
grand 'house' where the baby comes in the world and wanders 'homeless'
is the central proposition of the poem.
The closing segment of the poem 'The Plunge' is dedicated to
Martin Chuzzlewit, "- - - - - and when he pictured in his mind the ugly
chamber, false and quiet, through the dark hours of two nights - - - - - - - -

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he became his own ghost and phantom and was at once the haunting spirit
and the haunted man”75. In this poem Gunn has mixed life-science with
ultimate truth surrounding all of us. The poem creates a circle of birth and
death in between the two stays practical life, an opportunity confining
soul.
‘Saturnalia', a rare example of religiosity in the line of 'Jesus and
Mother' and 'Lazarus Not Raised', is a model of poignant critique of
religious mal-practices prevalent in Roman society. Gunn very gladly
admits that he and his brother Ander Gunn was brought up in no religion
at all, which helped enlarge his view across the religious fences. 'Faustus
Triumphant' is poetic version of Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus who
wishes to rule the universe uninterrupted, consequent upon that ambition
he met the doom beyond resurrection, "Flames inanimate me/ with
delight in times things/so intense that I am/almost lost to time."
There is multi-splitting of Faustus's personality for what ambition
he wanted to fulfill is impossible in the common conditions of life. 'What/
tracks led and there and there/ where I pricked the/ arm where I got/ the
blood to sign'. These lines of the poem honestly embody the implicit
sentiment of post-modern men whose soaring material ambition does not
honour the human limitation.
The Jack Straw’s Castle’s protagonist looks around and inside so
as to find out some peers but what he meets within is his ‘lone-self’ as
‘Misanthropos’ did. He wants to avoid the scare of loneliness in an
around his castle/body. The haunting isolation compels him to visualize
‘ladies’ and ‘pigs’ along with ‘car’ the signs of modern science-devices.

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In the tradition of metaphysical mode of poetry Gunn inhibits socio-

political references to keep his poems intellectually meritorious. “In his
most successful poem (and it is by that we must define him) the social
background is not usually very important”76.
‘The Road Map’ and ‘Courage, a Tale’ recall Gunn’s university
days experiences full of naughty and child like activities. This is the time
Gunn developed unnatural sexual habits like masturbation and
homosexuality. Traditionally these subjects are unpoetic however under
Duncan’s influence Gunn wrote on such subjects by admitting them in
autobiography. “Duncan’s homosexuality was a matter of public record---
--- Duncan raises the possibility that his sexual and poetic beginnings
may be connected”77. Both are identical in matter of connectivity sexual
practices being conducive force of poetic creation.
'Behind the Mirror' and 'Mandrakes' deal with existential dilemma
and Gunn's bending towards intoxicants while in America. ‘Behind the
Mirror’ tells 'I am the reflected self seemed identical alike yet separate
two flowers from the same plant'. 'Mandrake' symbolizes the drunken
state of contemporary civilization having no ear to humanistic values.
The teachings of Jesus are deliberately uncared for, whereas bombastic
shows are globally organized in His name. The image of 'Planet' signifies
creation, destruction and re-creation as a natural phenomenon which men
have to substantiate by adhering to Jesus's lessons in practice.
In 'The Release' the protagonist tries to locate the flying and
melting identity of 'other', 'He's unpredictable, clean of me (he never
notices me as I stare freely)’. The poem applies Poundian method of

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Juxtaposed images and symbols as Gary Snyder does, "The structure of

most of the longer poems could be described as based on the Poundian
method of juxtaposed images which is a method of putting all weight on
clarity and vividness of detai1”78. The concluding poem of Jack Straw's
Castle 'The Breaking Ground' is clearly associated with Gunn's life and
his mother. Gary Snyder and Gunn both wrote on their mothers in the
similar vein of reverence. It is divided into sub-titles; 1- Kent, 2-
Monterey. Gunn's mother has broken the intellectual and creative ground
by providing him fertile and imaginative upbringing which made him
what he is today. P.R. King's study of the poem is laudable:
“- - - - - - -in 'Breaking Ground' Gunn writes about his mother's
death. At first horrified by realization that her characteristic of
gestures, works and acts which made her so dear not utterly lost, he
goes on to remember her before her death. He imagines her in her
garden as he listens to a singer at a concert on the other side of
Atlantic and suddenly realizes that his mother is not dead but
dispersed in listening crowd”79.
D.H. Lawrence recall his mother and his early days in his small
poem 'Piano' which echoes well on Gunn's present one in theme and style.
The Passages of Joy (1982) contains poems that were written
during 1976 to 1981. The book is divided into three segments and cover
page has a mystical design revealing Gunn's poetic journey to be binary.
He begins his creative march from centre of being to posterity and
obverse. The process epitomizes God's creation and destruction of

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universe. Gunn uses the title having borrowed from Dr. Jonson's The
Vanity of Human Wishes:
Time hovers o'er. Impatient to destroy
And shuts up all the passages of joy.
The mission of Gunn's literary journey is to arrive at the station
where the passages of joy are unhampered. 'Elegy' the very first poem of
the book which outlines its protagonist in these words, 'Thin, tall, half
handsome/the thin hungry sweetness of his smile is gone'. The objectivity
and exactitude in description of personality is one of basic qualities of
Gunn. The symbol of 'river' is indicative of continuity of life which never
turns back exactly in the terms of social assumption. 'There will be no
turn of the river/ where we all are reunited'. The 'river' in philosophical
sense denotes eternal flow of time never turning back in which all of us
are bound to merge now or then.
The poem begins and ends in direct speech using emphatic images
to suggest the meaning. The poem avoids all punctuation hinting at
eternal flow of time-river encompassing all. On the stage of time men get
engaged in erratic deeds like 'Adultery', the common debauch practice of
post modern society. The poem carries T.S. Eliot's patches of 'The Waste
Land' and 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The hollow character of
contemporary civilization is evident in the following words, 'You know
how I love you, Darling'. The sexual hypocrisy is rampant in many
guises. The drama of infidelity and betrayal are played under the mask of
chastity:
By this time she was home she'd done it

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And her face was all grown over with expression

Dedicated to her husband showing
How interesting it had been, how
Innovative, a real breakthrough:
(You know how I Love you darling?)
‘New York’ is based on Gunn’s autobiography whereas
'Expression' is concerned with philosophic yearning accumulated in Gunn
from university days. Gunn's statement that “I spent a few weeks in New
York beginning a lifelong romance with it”80 adequately exposes his
attachment with the city. The poem 'Expression' castigates grave
hypocrisy of post-modern people in the matter of religion. In art museum
Virgin Mary is presented having a plastic toy and using lip colour as
substitute of divine glow. Gunn having experienced the vein of society,
religion and literature after world war comes to write like this:
- - - - - - they write with black irony
Or breakdown, mental institutions
And suicide attempts of which the experience
Does not always seem first hand
It is very poetic poetry.
‘A Walking Dream’, 'Sweet Things' and 'Cat and the Wind' deal
with the poet's experiences and reminiscences of America. 'Sweet Things'
celebrates childhood innocence as indispensable core of individual life
abundantly described by poem-picture duo in Positives. Rod Taylor's
bending towards America is Gunn’s own:

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“The earliest part of Rod Taylor's first book shows him

adventuring both toward and from identity. In 'Crossing' for example he
moves across the continent away from his Florida-self toward a
California-self. In his restless poetic exploration of North America Taylor
becomes numerous from his numerous sharing in experience of other.
Much in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, who are clearly
important for him”81.
American geography and culture have freshness and suitability to
Gunn's poetic genius. 'Small Plane in Kensasa' deals with the poet's visit
to Kensasa as a new adventure on a small plane to imbibe the panoramic
beauty of the place. 'The Exercise' is constituted of 'Sad Lake' and 'Trees
and Grass' and 'The Wind' largely in the fashion of 'Behind the Mirror'. In
the 'Sad Lake' the protagonist encounters his own self in totality. The sad
lake is covered with 'Green of over hanging bough'. The manifest images
of trees, grass and the protagonist himself are disturbed by the nasty wind
creating endless ripples on the surface of the sad lake. In the same way
'Hide and Seek' present natural phenomenon implying the different stages
of human life:
The crescent moon rises
Nine tenth of its still hidden
But imperceptibly moving
Below the moving star
And hugging the earth.
The picture that follows of father, mother and son collectively
symbolizes creative process at work all the time in universe. The

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philosopher in Gunn is always alert to watch universal happenings any

where, no matter scene be scientific or social or natural or anything else.
'As Expected' is a tired poet's live commentary on American people in
their natural way of behaviour. 'Roomful of Youngman sitting around idle
or idle on their cots'. The main issue of idle Americans is Vietnam-war
'most often clouding their conversation'. 'The Menace' discusses Gunn's
inclination towards homosexuality inferred from the recurrent line 'the-
one-wants-to-get-me'. Commenting on Robert Duncan's poetry the poet
admits that as of himself too, "- - - - - - - - - the theme of sexual
restlessness never completely leaves Duncan's poetry”82. Homosexual
desire compels the poet to modulate his poetry thus: 'Come out, come out
wherever you are/ come out of your hiding place/ put on a body now
show me a face'. The second part of the poem 'Song of the Camera' is
reflective in nature and assumes human life as 'a sentence cut from a
story' is a simulacrum of Shakespeare's idiomatic saying 'life is a tale told
by an idiot'. Gunn always brings together the fragmented, selves of live
into 'completeness'. He asserts 'I am the eye/ that cut the life/ you stand
you lie/ I am the knife'.
The poems 'Waitress', 'Keats at High gate' and 'His Room in
College' embody the experiences of the poet at different places. Waitress
paints an inside of a room. The waitress has been captivating the
customers in hotel for some long time. The second part tells Gunn's
longing for Keats. The last poem explains a teacher's chamber in a
College where Gunn used to visit for solving study related problems.

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These poems are composed on life's practical experiences lacking in

larger poetic or philosophical implications.
The 'June' presents two unnamed persons ignorant of each other's
existence. The ‘I’ is compared with a 'bud' yet to bloom and unaware of
prevailing surrounding. The 'bud' does not know how much
circumstantial blows it has to face in life. The poem is remembrance of
romantic poetry:
The month is cool as if on ground
High fog holds back the sky for days
But in their sudden patch of yard
The oriental poppies blaze.
‘San Francisco Street’ is all about Gunn's connection with the city
where he joyfully spent considerable lot of creative period. No chance
Gunn lets go unused of creating metaphysical riddle no matter the
description be honestly factual, see the instance:
Better remember what
Makes you secure,
Fuzz is still on the peach
Peach on the stem
Your looks looks after you
Looks after them.
Again Gunn’s American self is accounted for in 'The Miracle' and
'Victims'. In the first poem the poet goes to airport to fly for another city
but 'stopped off at some Mac Donald's'. While stopped Gunn notices
'Snail's track on the toe of his boot', an indication of life's rudimentary

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fact that is perpetual movement. The binding section ends showing a

woman's death deeply mourned by the poet.
The third section opens with 'Painkillers' which describes a king's
obsession of impeding death, assassination conspiracy, rivalry and revolt.
'Slow Walker' as usual reflects on the poet's walking in streets and
traverns of American cities. 'The Girls Next Door' propounds the thesis of
'change' and 'changelessness' in between which lies the secret of life. The
poet fails to differentiate, 'Like two hands on piano/ separate but not at
variance'. The idea of differentiation is discussed in 'Donahue's Sister'.
Here one mother's son and daughter are much apart from each other in
manner and corporal appearance.
'At an Intersection' delineates a witch like lady's psychopathic
behaviour. The mental instability of lady is noticeable in following
words, 'Like an old peasant witch/ out of place anywhere/ even at the
intersection/ where the worldly market street/meets the slum of sixth'. 'A
Drive to Los Almos' and 'Talbot Road' can be examined in the light of
following statement, "- - - - - - - - -my life insists on continuities between
America and England, between free verse and metre, between vision and
every day consciousness"83. Talbot Road is a Landon street where the
poet lived during 1964-65 and Los Almos is a tourist destination in
America Gunn frequented. The Passages of Joy is a meeting place of
metrical, non-metrical and free-verse composition letting Gunn fly the
way he likes as Shakespeare did in his last play The Tempest. For Gunn
the present is most valuable than finished past and unborn future. History

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and unseen, unpredictable future have nothing valid to add in the

existence of the protagonists.
The last poems of collection 'Transients and Residents', and 'Night
Taxi' are reflective and full of larger meaning. 'Transients and Residents'
consists of 'Falstaff', 'Crystal', 'Crosswords' and 'Interruption' dealing with
different unexplored corners of human life. Gunn led a life so far
deprived of smile, hence he created Falstaff, 'Neighbourhood satyre/ old
friend'. All segments of the poem can be securitized as the author himself
advises, "Writing poetry has in fact become a certain stage in my coping
with the world, and on in the way I try to understand what happens to me
and inside me”84.
The verbal rendering of 'understood' and 'experienced' is
impossible as Gunn maintains that poetry is an 'attempt to'. In 'Taxi
Driver' Gunn assumes the taxi driver's persona and tries to translate his
experiences but unsuccessfully. ‘Do I pass through the city / or does it
pass through me’. Gunn very clearly admits that job offers a lot of idiom
to his poems, "the rhythm of my poems follow the rhythm of physical
work I am doing at a given time"85 using proper street names and
monosyllables Gunn gives vitality and spirit to his description, '- - - - -no
more like tricks to turn:/ quick lively ending up/ with a cash payment'.
The foregoing study of Gunn's entire poems refutes John Press'
charge of lack of least social references and concerns. John Press
comments:
“One of the main flaws of Gunn’s work is that it lacks any
satisfactory social framework or terms of references. The myth of

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toughness is a poor substitute for traditions, religious beliefs, and codes

of conduct, nor is it possible to confer heroic stature on such shoddy
figures as Lofty, Young Edmund, the Boys and the Black Jackets. Even if
in his later works Gunn surveys these heroes with ironical eyes, his
attitude to them remains equivocal”86.
Barring Moly, Touch and Jack Straw's Castle there is substantial
social reference in remaining works of Gunn. The Passages of Joy
contains poems on social themes as 'Adultery' discusses. Tough
protagonists can sufficiently cope with the type of socio-political threats
emerging around these days. Gunn’s has glanced in every corner of
human life, it may be metaphysical, philosophical, social, political or
psychological. As an explorer Gunn has undertaken extrovert and
introvert journey so that his findings about human life can be more
reliable than any other poet of the age.

The Man with Night Sweats and Boss Cupid

Thom Gunn’s next and most famous collection of poems ‘The Man
with Night Sweats’ came in the year 1992. The Man with Night Sweats is
a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for
those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await
those who survive. It is also one of the few works of literature that have
fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS
epidemic poses. The nobility and sobriety of Thom Gunn’s forms
enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results
have the cathartic and healing power of great art.

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When the 1980s brought the AIDS epidemic to the gay community,
Gunn lost many of his friends to the disease. His grief over these losses
is, according to many critics, profoundly described in this award winning
collection. While some critics had complained that Gunn had been
‘squandering his talent’ by writing about his drug and gay experiences in
the 1970s and 1980s, they were ‘obliged to reconsider’ that assessment
with the release of The Man with Night sweats. Neil Powell praised this
book that ‘Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed closed
to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with
the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably.
One could hardly ask for more’.
While the verses contained in the collection often describe
heartbreaking personal loss, the poems are never self indulgent and never
moralistic. Celebrated poems like ‘Lament’, ‘In Time of Plague’, and
‘Courtesies of the Interregnum’ have so much dignity along with their
force that they do credit to the readers who have made them something
like classics already. His poems have turned increasingly to the subject of
morality.
In the collection ‘The Man with Night Sweats’, Gunn is drawn to
comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. ‘Still
Life’, a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of ‘the
tube his mouth enclosed/ In an astonished O’. ‘The Missing’ imagines the
vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a ‘Supple entwinement
through the living mass/ Which for all that I knew might have not end/
Image of an unlimited embrace’. But the poem that gives The Man with

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Night Sweats its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of
metaphor. The poem begins with a man waking at night (I wake up cold, I
who/ Prospered through dreams of heat) and recognizing the rising
weakess in his once powerful body. It concludes –
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
The delicate suggestion of alienation, or at least separation,
between self and body (Hugging my body to me) presages the even
greater disruptions that occur in the final couplet. We think of the earth is
being our foundation: we’re ‘on solid grounds’. The image of an
avalanche is especially disturbing, then, because it suggests that what had
supported our bodies is now bent on destroying them. The touch has
become a blow; the heat of friction has become a conflagration. Here,
Gunn is (consciously or not) rewriting the great American poem of unity
between body and earth, Robert frost’s ‘To Earthward’.
Gunn writes very movingly of the vicissitudes of his particular
kind of domesticity in the ‘The Hug’, a poem addressed to his long time
partner, Mike Kitay. In the poem, their grand passion has grown so

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familiar that when he wakes to find his partner hugging him from behind,
he says:
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not get
Become familial
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
The dryness of the embrace marks the transition from sexual to
domestic love, from the physical joy of sex to the sentimental joy of
being held by someone with whom a life has been shared. Now what
heterosexual male poet would celebrate such a transition? Persumably,
that poet would say how sexual attraction was attendant on the hug; or
else the poet would lament the passing of such passion. But Gunn does
neither – or if there is a touch of melancholy, it is balanced by an equal
sense of triumph.
Really, the early poems in the collection are more about age than
AIDS, though the hardships than Gunn faced certainly darkened his later
years, and perhaps made him long for his youth more passionately than
those are graced to have more time with their loved ones. Gunn’s friends

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and lovers were slowly and painfully stripped from him. The effect of
losing his friends on his writing is that the elegaic, often tormented poems
are imbued with both a survivor’s guilt at the mystery of why some were
infected while he was not, as well as a penchant for imagining the dead in
their after life- free from pain and content, such as in ‘Death’s Door’.
Gunn writes about four deceased friends who sit together watching the
living on a television set :
Arm round each other’s shoulders loosely,
Although they can feel nothing, who
When they unlearned their pain so sprucely
Let go of all sensation too.
Gunn attempts a catharsis of sorrow once agin in ‘The
Reassurance, writing that, ‘About ten days or so/ After we saw you dead/
You came back in a dream’. But this time Gunn won’t allow himself to
find solace so easily, ending the poem by writing, ‘How like you to be
kind,/ Seeking to reassure/ And yes, how like my mind,/ To make itself
secure’. It’s a painful moment, where Gunn once again forces himself, as
well as the reader, to recall the tragedy that Gunn’s life has become.
In another poem ‘In Time of Plague’, many touchy subjects are
brought to the surface. Drug abuse, homosexuality and the passages of
AIDS are just a few of the main topics in this poem. The poem is best
known for its first five lines. Gunn starts with ‘My thoughts are crowded
with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be
attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation’. As the poem continues, it is
quickly drawn to homosexual relationships and drugs with lines six and

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seven: ‘Who are these two, these fiercely attractive men who want me to
stick their needle in my arm?’ These statements, along with the time
period, are indicative of the AIDS epidemic.
In ‘To a friend in Time of Trouble’, Gunn comments on destructive
relationships by describing a bird scooping up its prey. Then he writes,
‘You know/ It is not cruel, it is not human’. He suggets that in order for
an action to be cruel, the actor must be aware of the cruelty. The bird,
however, is acting out of necessity; it follows a natural instinct wihtin
itself to survive, whereas humans often act out of self importance. On
some level it is true that the human animal should not be held to a higher
standard than other animals, but it seems that understanding natural
element of balance within our environment can often help us deal with
‘grief and rage’, and the speaker sees his friend benefitting in this way.
Boss Cupid (2000) retains some of the old, militaristic metaphors,
but there are, more often, metaphors of settlement, negotiation,
community, even democracy. In some respect a sequel to The Man with
Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memoralizing of friends who have died, an
anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age. The poems are
written under the sign of Cupid, ‘devious master of our bodies’, but their
intimacies are always heard against the sociable human hum of an entire
community which gunn depitcs in poems of fluent grace, as formal as
they are relaxed.
Boss Cupid opens with a moving elegy to Robert Duncan, one of
the last century’s great and tireless experimenters. Poets often write about
their forerunners to lend their voices a kind of genealogical credibility, to

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show how the torch has been passed, to write themselves into the myth.
And the poem does, in fact, wind up with an anecdote of how the aging
poet once stumbled down a flight of stairs, to be caught in ‘the strong
arms of Thom Gunn’. But Gunn gently blows the myth aprt. ‘He fell
across the white steps there alone/ I hadn’t caught him, hadn’t seen in
time’, he confesses. Gunn assurance here, a perfect balance of modesty
and confidence, is the kind of authority that doesn’t need to wear a badge.
The mainstay of Gunn’s poetry has always been the tough plain
statement, a terseness that’s much more than a frame for well-turned
phrases. Much of The Man with Night Sweats was addressed to the
friends dead or dying of AIDS. Specially in the first section, the poems of
Boss Cupid have the same laconic grace, the sense of mourning contained
by formality. In a quietly under stated poem about a mother’s suicide, the
children play outside on the winter lawn, calling to be let in, ‘till they
knew what it meant/ Knew all there was to know’. The butcher, whose
son is missing in the war, ‘stood in his shop and found/ No bottom to his
sadness,/ Nowhere for it to stop’. We feel throughout the poet’s firm
resolve to go on, to tell the sadness down to the bottom. The poems are
tough, but toughness has its own warmth, engaging us where cool
detachment doesn’t.
After his first two poems on his mother’s suicide, the theme of
fatalism comes to the fore in ‘A Young Novelist’: ‘You might say a
whole life led upto it,/ A Novel’s publication’, and, as it happens, the
death of a lover also. However, the crushing blow of circumstance effects
not only a loss of response, but a loss predicated on first seeking

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transcendence in a deliberate aversion that momentarily throws the reader

into confusion also :
Once on his way to school a schoolboy surfaced
From all of loss to one cold London street
And noticed minute leaves, they were soft points,
Virgin-green, newly eased out of black twings,
And didn’t know, really, what to make of them;
Then turning back to it found he no longer
Knew what to make of the other thing, despair.
In a poem addressed ‘To Cupid’, Gunn presses home the
grievances of modern homosexual love. Upon overhearing the sounds of
a convivial wedding dinner, he calls Cupid the ‘devious master of our
bodies’ and nurses a subterranean sense of injustice. ‘You were the
source then of my better rest’, he concludes, recalling Propertius in the
Latin love poet’s only instance of naming Cupid rather than using the
honorific ‘Amor’: ‘Quin ego deminuou curam, quod saepe Cupido/ huic
malus esse solet, cui bonus ante fruit’, (‘Still, my sorrow diminishes when
I consider that Cupid is often cruel to those he had been kind to before’).
__
In Boss Cupid, Gunn takes erotic life as his principle subejct at
the age of seventy-one __ and offers poems which are at once emotionally
profound and exuberant. A significant number of poems in this volume
are concerned with the cycle of desire - whether instanced in an evening
or a lifetime. In ‘Nights with the Speed Bros’, for example, the speaker
begins by enthusiastically recounting a sexual encounter :
Lovers, not brothers, whatever they might say

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That brilliant first night, being equally blonde

Equally catlike as they reached beyond
The tropes of dalliance to the meat of play.

After two more quatrains, however, the poem concludes :

Then dawn developed in the room, but old.
........ I thought (unmitigated restlessness
Clawing its itch): “I gave up sleep for this ?”
Dead leaves replaced the secret life of gold.

In ‘The Problem’, similarly, the speaker follows a stranger upto his

apartment and they have sex. Though ‘He seemed all body’, the speaker
notices ‘A strip of blackboard with its groove for chalk’ on the wall with
a half-completed math problem. He discovers that the stranger is a
graduate student in mathematics, ‘his true/ Passion cyphered in chalk
beyond my reach’. Such chance encounters are significant to Gunn’s
poetry for several reasons: in the first place, the occasion is ostensibly
one of physical need. The unknown body is addressed as flesh, which
__
allows for the psyche to make surprising – even startling appearances.
Moreover, as a social poet, he attends to the roles that one chooses or has
conferred upon oneself through erotic relationships. And his focus on gay
culture proves particularly apt in this regard, given the greater fluidity of
sexual roles available. As his characters often say in various ways, ‘We
are the same in different ways/ We are different in the same way’.

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Often these roles and their occasions take on Jamesian complexity

in these poems. ‘In the Post Office’, for instance, traces a memory
sparked by the sight of a kid in line to mail a letter. The young man
reminds Gunn of a formal lover, who left him for another, and later died
of AIDS. The following year, Gunn recalls, he went to visit the rival lover
__
who is himself now on his deathbed – ‘at his mother’s phoned request/
To pick up one of your remembrances,/ A piece of stained-glass you had
made, now his,/ I did not even remember, for less want’. The
triangulation of desire – and the roles and spoils which that desire confers
__
exceed the limits of our awareness, as well as the present social
condition by which we define ourselves. As both poet and ‘survivor’,
Gunn simultaneously records and discovers such hidden emotional
network.
__
For Gunn, the repitition and varition of love its forms based on
__
past experience, and its inevitable cycle of growth and decay are not
simply observed phenomena, but constitute a poetics. Despite the
__
varieties of forms love takes of which Boss Cupid celebrates a
remarkable catalogue __ Gunn finally suggests that the essence of instinct
or taste is established early, and its power dynamic is in some sense
invariable. In ‘A GI in 1943’, he recalls being thirteen and seeing a young
man in uniform, and declares, ‘Power/ as beauty, beauty/ power, that/ is
all my cock knew or/ cared to know..... and/ has learned nothing/ fresh in
fifty-three years’. This statement undergoes a slight revision in
‘Troubadour’, a sequence of love songs in the voice of Jeffrey Dahmer.
The sequence describes Dahmer’s acquistion, preservation, and

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reassemblage of body parts as an instance and emblem of the erotic

imagination in general. After describing an adolescent fixation on Iron
__
Man muscle-building magazine, Iron Man becomes for Dahmer a
demanding cupid :
I beg from memory each limb
Each body part that spoiled with time........
From my original conquest,
The cage once tented in its skin,
Now free standing ribs that I’m
Leaving as bare bone rather than
Refleshing, best part of the best,
Oh love, Iron Man.
As in the previous volumes, Gunn’s persona in Boss Cupid tends to
be a bit to the side of what he sees, but implicated as well. In some of his
best poems, he begins by wryly observing the foibles or unkindness
exhibited by barflies, hustlers, dealers, lovers, and so forth, and then
acknowledging or revealing his own involvement in their transactions. It
is evidence of his great humanity as a poet that such revelations never
seem merely shocking in the manner of so much cinema verite. For
instance, this encounter with a young drifter :
First saw him
on the street in front, in the
bar’s garbage, identifying
unfinished bears and swigging
off what was left to them,

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shameless and exuberant,

remarking in a friendly fashion
“It’s a doggy dog world”.
Charming error.
In this case, Gunn is an experienced observer (having seen this type
many times before), and remarks on the miss-stated cliche with a touch of
professorial condescension. Yet the poem moves on to a surprising
proximity between the speaker and the young man :
It was already out
pushing soft into my hand. It was
a lovely gift to offer an old
stranger
without conditions
a present from New Orleans
in a doggy dog world.
One would hardly be tempted to describe Gunn’s poetry in the
superlatives often applied to poets who engage traditional prosody, such
as ‘impeccable’ or ‘elegant’. He never exhibits the formal brilliance of
James Merill or Geoffrey Hill, say, and is capable of writing a forced
rhyme or awkward rhythm. Yet the rough-and-ready quality of Gunn’s
verse often proves an asset : he is never aesthete, and his forms __ whether
__
open or closed prove eminetly functional. His writing is both topical
and substantive __ and thus feels very much of the world.

References

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1. C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, Modern Poetry Studies in Practical Criticism, 1963,
P. 30-31.
2. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 11. (Intro. by C. Wilmer).
3. Kingsley Amis, The Faber Popular Reciter, 1978, P. XII-XV.
4. Anthony Thwaite, Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, 1957, P.
151.
5. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography 1982, P.
174.
6. Ibid, P. 153.
7. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry of Fiction of 1950, P. 119.
8. Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, P. 151.
9. The Movement, P. 182-83.
10. P. R. King, Nine Contemporary Poets : A Critical Introduction, P.103-4.
11. The Occasions of Poetry, P.34.
12. Essays on Twentieth Century Poets, (Poetry of Thom Gunn) appearing in
Critical Quality, 1961, P. 234.
13. The Occasions of Poetry P. 173.
14. The Occasions of Poetry, Introduction, P. 11.
15. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 187-188.
16. The Movement, P. 108.
17. Bernard Bergonzi, The Twentieth Century, ed, 1970, P. 306.
18. Nine contemporary Poets. P. 182-83.
19. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 176-77.
20. Essays on Twentieth Century Poets, P. 300.
21. H.G. Blakham, Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 8
22. Contemporary English Poetry, P. 152.
23. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 30.
24. Ibid, P. 105.
25. Ibid, P. 74.
26. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 155.
27. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 111.
28. Ibid, P. 72.
29. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 119.
30. Essays on Twentieth Century Poets, P. 234.
31. The Movement, P. 30.
32. Ibid, P. 186.
33. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 175.
34. Ibid, P. 175.
35. Ibid, P. 179.
36. Ibid, P. 179
37. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 46
38. Frederic Grubb, Vision of Reality: A Study of Liberalism in Twentieth
Century Verse, 1965, P. 210.
39. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 9.
40. Double Lyric: Divisiveness and Communal Activity in Recent English
Poetry, Routledge and Kegar Paul, 1980, P. 186
41. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 150.
42. John Press, Rule verses Energy, Trends in British Poetry since the World-
War, 1963, P. 198.
43. Carpenters of Light: Some Contemporary English Poets, P. 45

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44. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 35.

45. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 171.
46. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 122.
47. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 106.
48. Six Existentialist Thinkers, P. 73.
49. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 180.
50. Double Lyric, P. 129.
51. Ibid, P. 178.
52. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 139.
53. Nine Contemporary Poets, P. 98.
54. C.W.K. Mundle, Perceptions: Facts and Theories, 1917, P. 81.
55. Six Existential Thinkers, P. 95.
56. The Movement, P. 276.
57. Double Lyric, P. 187.
58. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 22.
59. Perceptions: Facts and Theories, P. 68.
60. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 122.
61. Nine Contemporary Poets, P. 136.
62. Perceptions: Facts and Theories, P. 82-83.
63. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 114.
64. Ibid, P. 42.
65. Ibid, P. 39.
66. Perceptions: Facts and Theories, P. 161.
67. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 17.
68. Ibid, P. 138.
69. Ibid, P. 168.
70. Nine Contemporary Poets, P. 105.
71. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 176
72. Ibid, P. 184.
73. Ibid, P. 33.
74. Ibid, P. 140.
75. Ibid, P. 140.
76. Ibid, P. 63.
77. Ibid, P. 119.
78. Ibid, P. 45.
79. Nine Contemporary Poets, P. 106.
80. The Occasions of Poetry, P. 178.
81. Ibid, P. 135.
82. Ibid, P. 129.
83. Ibid, P. 185.
84. Ibid, P. 185.
85. Ibid, P. 38.
86. Rule Verses Energy, P. 199.

175
Philip Larkin
and
Thom Gunn

A Comparative
Study