TOP94-DES91
This Old Poem #94:
Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 6/12/04

  Thom Gunn is 1 of those odd literary characters that is hard to fit into a group- save that he’s an at best mediocre poet. He’s gay, but has not much in common with a lot of the hardcore ‘gay’ poets of his era- Ginsberg, O’Hara, Ashbery, etc. He’s British but has little in common with the Kingsley Amis, Ted Hughes, or Philip Larkin. He’s a San Franciscan for decades yet had nothing in common with the Beatniks. He’s pretty much a formalist although none would compare him to a Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, or the Neo-Formalists of recent vintage.
  The truth is that there is a lot to be said FOR TG’s poetry. It’s being good is not 1 of those things. His height was in the 1950s & then the inevitable decline & repetition set in. Claiming to be an ‘experimentalist’ [read- I don’t want the flaws in my poetry pointed out so I’ll use this appellation to claim that you ‘just don’t get it’] TG’s verse is as banal as it gets. Recall, he’s an academic so there are limits to his ‘experimenting’. The c.v.:

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, in 1929. Before enrolling in Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1950, he spent two years in the national service and six months in Paris. In 1954, he relocated to San Francisco and held a one-year fellowship at Stanford University, where he studied with Yvor Winters. Gunn has published more than thirty books of poetry in the United States and Britain, including Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); Frontiers of Gossip (1998); Collected Poems (1994); The Man with Night Sweats (1992), for which he received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Passages of Joy (1983); Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979); Jack Straw's Castle (1976); To the Air (1974); Moly, and My Sad Captains (1971); Touch (1968); and The Sense of Movement (1959). He has also written several collections of essays, including The Occasions of Poetry (1982; U.S. edition, 1999). Among his honors are a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He teaches at the University of California in Berkeley.

  TG has faded in the last few decades- his ‘star power’ not what it was in the 60s & 70s. But he had a small resurgence in notoriety due to a book in 1992 called The Man with the Night Sweats. Unfortunately, like most ‘disease poems’ & most  of any art concerning AIDS, the book & the title poem were verging on bathos, & steeped in banality.

The Man With Night Sweats

I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.

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.

  I’ve underlined the clichés, which are bad enough- but for a ‘formal’ poem this poem has horrible music. For example- take the closing couplet:

 `    -     -        `      `    -

As if hands were enough

 -      `     -   `  -    -        `
To hold an avalanche off.

  Although I’ve shown before that meter is the oldest poetic fallacy it seems to me that 1 devoted to it should at least attempt to mimic it. The 2 lines have a horribly gnarly sound because they have no discernible meter- a dactyl becomes a mishmash that ends up an anapest, with neither an iamb nor trochee as bridge. Forget the banality of the statement, the music is terrible.
  But I’m not gonna worry with rejiggering the rimes to make the music flow better. I’ll just clean up the sentiment. Here ‘tis:

The Man With Night Sweats

I wake up dream-cold, I who
Prospered through their residue.

My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

The body I could trust
Was risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.

The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Hugging my body to be
The shield that will go through me.

  Only by making this poem couplets can the music become even passable. As for the ‘suffering’. Note the switching around of nouns & the reusing of some words from discarded lines. The speaker in my version is not so pathetic & weak. This alone, allows a reader to get a little more ‘in’ to the poem. But dropping the final couplet (aside from the gnarly sound problem) lifts the poem the most. Instead of an act of self-worship & comfort we get the body as the actor upon the mind of the speaker. This lends duality to the speaker & allows more than 1 interpretation to the poem- or at least its ending.
  TG has often been lauded as ‘courageous’, or ‘brave’- especially in the last decades when AIDS reared its ugly head. But, what. may I ask, is courageous or brave about poems like this- or this in particular? I am reminded of the poetry of teenagers I would run across in cafés- whose every fear was the spur for an opus, whose every insecurity  was muse for a classic.
  But, I ask you to take a really hard look at the original poem & realize that TG was a senior citizen when he wrote this self-indulgent whine. AIDS or no, it’s a shame that such people are actually in the classrooms. Were this written by 1 of those teenagers 1 might shake 1’s head & say ‘Ah, youth!’ But at TG’s age 1 can only mumble, ‘Why not, death?’

Final Score: (1-100):

Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats: 45
TOP’s The Man With Night Sweats: 62

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