Thom Gunn: The Man with Night Sweats

Although Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn, both English Movement poets, wrote in approximately the same stylized manner of verse, their similarities are only aesthetics deep. The cynical, often abrasive voice of Larkin’s final book of poetry High Windows clashes violently against the compassion and thinly veiled anguish of Gunn’s autobiographical 1992 collection, The Man with Night Sweats, which begins with a sobering look at sensuality in the later years of a man’s life. And while the primary subject matter of the book—AIDS, and the decimation of Gunn’s community of homosexual friends—is not immediately addressed, the early poems are still quietly sad and nostalgic for youth and life before the AIDS virus.

The first poem in the collection, “The Hug,” recounts a night spent drinking and dining with a friend, and as Gunn climbs into bed, the friend follows behind: It was not sex,” Gunn writes, 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 yet/Become familial.

Really, the early poems in the collection are more about age than AIDS, though the hardships that Gunn faced certainly darkened his later years, and perhaps made him long for his youth more passionately than those who are graced to have more time with their loved ones. Gunn’s friends and lovers (who are named in the epilogue), as we’re shown in the 4th sequence of poems, were slowly and painfully stripped from him.

The effect of losing his friends on his writing is that the elegiac, 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 afterlife—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: Arms 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. Although these are captivating lines, the image of the friends watching the living on TV is a touch too cheesy for me, and while this is a nit-picky complaint, it bothers me that Gunn first claims the dead feel nothing, yet they watch the TV with both delight and tears at first. It's not that I particularly care whether, in Gunn's imagined afterlife, the dead are supposed to be numb or sentimental, so much as the image looses some potential for power by losing its focus.

Gunn attempts a catharsis of sorrow once again in “The Reassurance,” writing that, About ten days or so/After we saw you dead/You came back in a dream. I’m alright now you said. 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.

The final sequence of poems is brimming with beautiful lines in the midst of a brutal reality, beginning with the opening stanza of the title poem, “The Man with Night Sweats”: I wake up cold, I who,/ Prospered through dreams of heat,/ Wake to their reside,/ Sweat, and a clinging sheet. Gunn creates a style of verse that’s cutting, and always seems to end sooner than expected, leaving the reader slightly jolted and with a sense of whiplash. Another elegant moment in the darkness occurs in the final stanza of “Still Life,” when Gunn writes of a deceased friend, Back from what he could neither/ Accept, as one opposed,/ Nor as a life-long breather,/ Consentingly let go,/ The tube his mouth enclosed/ In an astonished O. Again, the same short lines, which are simply but powerfully delivered, illuminating the synthetic beauty of the lines brilliantly against the inhumanity of the moment.

The modern poetry reader may initially hit a wall reading The Man with Night Sweats; while the subject matter is contemporary, the verse may feel contrived because of the maniacally metered lines and the unfashionably perfect rhyme schemes. The poems with an ABAB ryhme scheme, such as “An Invitation,” can be especially hard to take seriously at first, but ultimately the poems have the opposite effect. The crafting of the verse is in tune with the voice. The anguish and compassion of Gunn's writing pours unfettered from each poem, and after reading this collection, it seemed to me that Gunn was one of the most unabashedly sentimental poets I had read in quite some time. Rather than feeling I had read a book of masterfully constructed machines, I finished the volume believing I had witnessed the remnants of a man's heart.