In August 1991, while reviewing a fresh anthology of sixteenth‑century poetry, Thom Gunn drew attention to two sonnets by Sir Thomas Wyatt. These poems confronted the execution of Wyatt’s companions and associates, among them Anne Boleyn. Describing the pieces as poignant would scarcely capture their immediate force. The fourth stanza of the shorter poem reads:
The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate
For all favour, glory, or might
That yet circa Regna tonat.
(The Latin refrain means: [Jove] thunders round a throne.)
“We may assume that the sight was of Ann’s beheading,” Gunn noted. The second poem, he went on, also “mourns the death of the five with whom the Queen was supposed to have committed adultery… The range of [Wyatt’s] feeling is considerable, for he thinks as he grieves… And he distinguishes between them [the dead men], telling the reader how each meant something different to him; but in these lines he weeps for all:
And thus, farewell, each one in hearty wise.
The axe is home, your heads be in the street.
The trickling tears doth fall so from mine eyes,
I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.”
Gunn wrote of these four lines: “The axe’s work is over and their heads are on display, but the phrases employed are so mildly, almost comfortably familiar that they increase the horror of the line, of which the implication might be that executions have become by now an everyday and homely routine. The understated force is such that it spills over into a kind of authentification of the next two lines, making us read as simple truth an imagery that might otherwise have seemed commonplace in its overstatement.”
These poems deal with ideas of strength and weakness; they dramatize the body itself, as though it were a country in revolt that was once a place of ease or even ecstasy.
The close attention Gunn paid to these two elegies for Wyatt’s friends does not imply that Gunn was necessarily influenced by these poems when he wrote his own elegies for his own dead friends in the volume The Man with Night Sweats, published in 1992. Rather, it reveals how alert Gunn was to the style and syntax of English lament poetry, to the strategies of control and containment, as much as to the scrupulous shaping of diction and prosody in which layers of dark, complicated feeling are expressed.
Gunn analyzed the inherited poetic tradition of lament. Regarding Ben Jonson’s “To Heaven” and “On My First Sonne,” he wrote: “The emotions in these two poems are difficult, scrupulously created, and qualified: he cannot live with despair more than any man, but he also cannot pretend that willed equanimity is simple or constant.” About W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” Gunn noted “the care and the cunning of the style” and added that “its very finish, serving to place all impulsive decisions many drafts anterior to the version we read.”
In the opening stanza of Gunn’s titular poem, The Man with Night Sweats, there seems to be a clash between Latin and Anglo‑Saxon just as there is a struggle between health and illness.
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
Among the twenty words in these four lines, seventeen are monosyllabic; only two—”prospered” and ”residue”—derive from Latin. The tone is stark and precise; the “clinging sheet” is not a figure of speech or a metaphor, but a literal, damp sheet. Yet this single, direct statement is not plain or casual. The words “prospered” and ”residue” are chosen to create a deliberate distance and formality.
In his remarks on poetic speech, Yeats wrote: “All that is personal soon rots, it must be packed in ice or salt.” In The Man with Night Sweats, Gunn places the personal voice against the icy, salted texture of a heightened sound. The clear rhyme in lines two and four of the poem’s first stanza contrasts with the lighter rhyme of “who” and “residue,” while the iambic trimeter in lines two and four clashes with the rougher, uncertain meter of lines one and three, which convey a shock, fear, or stark realization.
The next stanza is a mere two lines, the first dominated by two strong, stressed, one‑syllable terms—”flesh” and “shield,” followed by an uncluttered iambic trimeter:
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
These poems explore notions of strength and frailty; they stage the body as if it were a nation in revolt, once a realm of ease or even rapture. Since the body, particularly the male body, had long been a central subject for Gunn, he confronts its decline with a reverent intensity. In a hospital, for instance, he observes a friend being carried from
Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom
The hedonistic body basks within
And takes for granted—summer on the skin,
Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea
In a dry mouth.
(from “Lament”)
Illness, for Gunn, represents a lost, forsaken kind of vigor:
It truly must be difficult for my friend
To hold on to the substance that is him,
Once sternly regulated in the gym,
Prime flesh now softening on his giant frame.
(from “Courtesies of the Interregnum”)
As with Wyatt more than four centuries earlier, Gunn’s poems on the deaths of companions uncover stark rhymes that carry more power than subtle ones, and unadorned lines that outshine ornate ones. Some might argue that these late elegies mark a return to the discipline and measured prosody Gunn had embraced at the start of his career. Yet the poems in The Man with Night Sweats remain sharper, plainer, and more austere than Gunn’s earlier formal pieces. They even welcome an awkwardness at times, something Gunn admired in certain poems by Thomas Hardy.
Gunn’s way of watching and noticing with the full weight of pure sympathy makes its way, with chiseled care, into a reticent eloquence.
These verses carry the ease and directness of a song. The lucidity of the diction seems to serve both as a means of embracing difficult emotion and as a method for keeping it at a respectful distance. They memorialize not only departed friends but also the long days of illness they endured in an era when AIDS loomed as a death sentence. In their restrained eloquence and refusal to offer facile consolation, the poems confront the hush surrounding a survivor’s experience and fulfill the impulse to articulate something true and exact, almost ceremonial.
“No poet,” T. S. Eliot observed, “no artist of any kind, has his complete meaning alone.” Since many of Gunn’s friends perished in San Francisco, a city that had once brought him happiness and liberty, these elegies also stand as a monument to a period of communal sorrow. A portion of Gunn’s approach is to keep his own voice as quiet and impersonal as possible under the weight of such losses. In an essay on Thomas Hardy’s 1912–13 poems about the death of his first wife, Gunn discussed a piece that “is concerned with its subject to the extent of excluding the speaker’s personality, even when his emotion is the subject of the poem…for [the poet] sees his emotion as one which anybody in his situation would be able to feel.”
Gunn’s habit of watching and listening with the full force of sincere sympathy is expressed, with precise craftsmanship, as a quiet yet powerful eloquence. As he forges his quatrains and couplets, he engages not simply in feeling or thought, but in shaping so that what he feels and thinks becomes secondary to the subject—the deceased or dying—on whom the poem’s energy must concentrate.
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From The Man with Night Sweats: Poems by Thom Gunn, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, September 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Thom Gunn. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1992 by Thom Gunn. Introduction copyright © 2024 by Colm Tóibín. All rights reserved.
