Written by: Liam Smith
Every few months, I am somehow forced into rethinking my long-held beliefs of poetry; Thom Gunn’s collection The Man with Night Sweats instigated an abrupt appreciation for metered poetry. I’ve always felt that formal poetry is antiquated, and that “contemporary” poets write in free verse. However, Gunn’s collection has shown how radical poets can be within traditional forms; how the sound quality of a poem can mirror and enliven its subject. My goal for this blog post is to demonstrate this mirroring of form and subject within Gunn’s poem “The Man with Night Sweats,” and hopefully to encourage other free verse poets into an appreciation of meter.
Gunn’s speaker in “The Man with Night Sweats” inhabits the bodily deterioration of an AIDS victim with the sureness of the “I” pronoun. Despite the outward deterioration introduced at the outset with “I wake up cold” (l. 1), the speaker’s skin carries a great deal of strength through being “its own shield / Where it was gashed, it healed” (ll. 5-6). The word “shield” carries a heroic connotation and presents the speaker’s body as independent and strong alongside the implied self-healing agency granted to his skin in the following line. The speaker in “The Man with Night Sweats” is the one sick with AIDS, therefore, the speaker’s body is the direct site of resistance against the virus. As the poem continues, this individual account is increasingly percolated by the political; he internalizes the external assumption that he is to blame for contracting AIDS, “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” (ll. 7-12). In the first two lines of this passage, the speaker’s exploration of their own body is framed as trustworthy in comparison to the simultaneous danger and wonder of the foreign bodies, representing new sexual encounters he explores. Assigning the speaker’s body with trust and security presents an external strength alongside an isolation; the wonders from the bodies of others are codified as a danger, representing a perceived cost of intimacy during the AIDS epidemic.
The imagery of shielding becomes complicated as the speaker’s condition worsens and he tries to protect his own body from the advancing disease, “Hugging my body to me / As if to shield it from / the pains that will go through me” (ll. 18-20). AIDS has wrecked the shield of his body, and the image of the self-hug reads like an attempt to reclaim himself. The speaker recognizes the futility of his self-made shield, “As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off,” but there is now an implied distance between the body and the speaker. Gunn’s chosen poetic form completes the assemblage of the narrowness of its speaker’s body. Every line in the poem is connected to another by rhyme, giving the language a physical crisscross reminiscent of the somber image of the speaker’s self-hug. This narrowness in form carries a duality through the action of the poem; initially the speaker believes their body to be narrow, that it is “its own shield,” but near the end the speaker attempts to self-impose the narrowness on themselves via their “hands…to hold an avalanche off” (ll. 23 24). This poem reflects in form and theme a struggle with the consequences of repression within the speaker’s physical body; the speaker seems subdued and limited by the rigid forms and self-hugging imagery within the poem. The image of the shield is two-pronged in the poem. There is a given shield, “I cannot but be sorry / The given shield was cracked,” and a created shield via the self-embrace from the penultimate stanza (ll. 13-14). Upon their admission that the given shield (his queer identity) is broken, the speaker’s strength deteriorates much more rapidly. The degradation of the speaker’s perception of his queer identity directly results in a loss of bodily strength, demonstrating the tension between personal (sexual identity) and political (external perceptions/self-perceptions of queerness).
Featured Image Caption: A young Thom Gunn in a leather jacket.
