In this post, I am going to analyse the Thom Gunn poem, Man With Night Sweats.
The Man with Night Sweats was published in 1992, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The rise of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s was shocking at the time and was largely covered up through the 1980s the silent spread of disease was known by health professionals and the gay comunity. 'In the early 1980s, reports of a strange new disease began emerging from the United States. It was picked up in the British gay press – Gay News ran a story in November 1981 under the headline “Gay cancer or mass media scare?” – but relatively few people noticed.' (Weston, 2021). Gunn wrote this poem as he was watching his friends suffering and dying; 'I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.' (Spacey, 2023) The poem here is expressing the pain of his friends through his words
The poem is in the form of a Caelica '(Latin for Heavenly) - short octets, alternately rhyming, ended by a rhyming couplet.' (Spacey, 2023). This form of poetry comes from a poem by Greville (published 1633) which, ' in his sinewy and demanding verse include philosophical treatises and unperformed melodramas (Alaham and Mustapha) that have a somber Calvinist tone, presenting man as a vulnerable creature inhabiting a world of unresolved contradictions' (Encylopedia Brittanica, 2025). Gunn used this form as in his poem the tension is between his body that he once knew and trusted to his body now which is weak and does not protect him.
In the second quatrain (Lines 2 and 3)
'The body I could trust
Even while I adored'
This is his show of strength and goes on to suggest that as he felt immortal and he trusted in his own body he could take risks. Then later in the third quatrain (Line 2, 3 and 4)
'The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.'
His body is cracked, this extends to his mind not functioning as it should, his flesh now 'reduced and wrecked', this is destruction of not just his body but all that he knows, like Samson his strength has been taken and he now cannot live. Here, the use of enjambment makes the pace quite fast as you are forced to continue on as the line runs through to the next line. In the final (fourth) rhyming couplet (lines 1 & 2) the reader is breathless at the end of the poem, the despair as he can no longer protect himself from an 'avalanche', this will suffocate, crush and kill him and an avalanche is cold harsh, it suggests isolation. Many who died of AIDS were in isolation, alone in death.
'As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.'
In the 1980s AIDS patients were treated very badly in British and possibly worse in American hospitals, 'AIDS patients are locked in hospital rooms, denied care and treated like pariahs in society. Because of the lack of education around AIDS' (Mussen, 2021). In the 1980s there were still laws against homesexual realtionships and literature such as Section 28*.
This poem means a lot to me and discovering Gunn was one of the pleasures of my life, this poem makes my heart ache as I read it. In terms of the form and literary devices, I looked at enjambment as I was using run on sentences and polysyndeton, as I was talking about the rhythm and pace in the work of Wallace and my own work, which is linked here to how enjambment is used. There is so much more that can be explored here but for this short post, it has been helpful to meditate on the meaning, form and just one of the literary devices used.
References
Austin, A. (2022). LitCharts. [online] LitCharts. Available at: https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/thom-gunn/the-man-with-night-sweats [Accessed 11 Feb. 2025].
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