The Man with Night Sweats

by Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Gay, Queer Lit, American, Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex, and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bundle in verse that especially well captures the gay experience amidst the AIDS epidemic, not shying away from descriptions of lust and attraction
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.
- The Man with Night Sweats

Especially section 4 of The Man With Night Sweats, focussing on deaths of friends due to AIDS, slowly withering away and dying painfully, hits emotionally. The bundle starts off incredibly strong with The Hug, on nostalgia and disorientation in sex, while sleepy and drunk, can bring.
The depiction of same-sex attraction by Thom Gunn in general is well executed:
I was seduced by innocence
- beard scarcely visible on his chin
by the god within
- Odysseus on Hermes

The Life of the Otter, containing world play of the lean and hairy gay body type, from an initial zoological take, is innovative. The poem Looks captures desire for a “wrong” man expertly, The Stealer alludes to the anticipation of being penetrated.
Relationship drama is perfectly captured in:
Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.
- Jamesian

In general I’m not used to (serious) poetry rhyming, but the themes and social commentary in the bundle are definitely nuanced. From taking the perspective of homeless in his poems, and Meat being critical of farm animal usage, while In Time of Plague narrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on dating and attraction, all the while assessing the pros and cons of a potential threesome. The contrast between a focus on muscles, a healthy lifestyle and death features prominently in Courtesies of the Interregnum and To the Dead Owner of a Gym. Lament is a heartbreaking account of AIDS ravaging someone. Section 4 of the bundle is in general excellent and ends kind of hopeful with a queer man adopting a son in A Blank.
An impressive and frank poetry bundle!

[Gaby | read.onrepeat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine everyone being invited to the same party. Everyone who goes dies. And you're the one person who never made it there.

That was the image I kept thinking about while reading The Man with Night Sweats.

Gunn was writing during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, at a time when people around him were getting sick and dying, when the disease had no cure and there was still so much uncertainty about how it was transmitted and how to protect yourself. I knew this was going to be a beautiful (because Gunn, duh) but difficult collection.

I wish I had the right words to write something that would do this book justice, but I don't. So here's my regular, barely legible English review.

Gunn begins the collection with The Hug. A poem about bodies connecting, two people holding each other. In a time when physical contact was a source of fear. Gunn chooses an embrace as his opening image. You have no idea what that did to my heart, I was already sobbing on the first page.

As I continued reading, I realized why: physical contact becomes a vocabulary for intimacy, but also for vulnerability. The body, that is so prominent in Gunn's work, becomes the thread connecting all the poems together. It became the center of life, meaning, survival and ultimately death.

Bodies are constantly doing something. They're learning, exploring, adapting, touching. There is a sense that being alive means being able to move, change, respond. So, when we reach Part 4, and Gunn decides to stop... you guys 😭😭

If this collection had a volta, it would be the first poem of Part 4: The Man with Night Sweats.

The opening embrace comes back, but everything has changed. At the beginning, one body reaches another. Here, the body can only reach itself, trying to protect itself from something it cannot possibly hold back.

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

This was so beautiful and meticulously crafted, with this razor-sharp formal discipline that worked hard to build a protective shield around overwhelming feelings. What I thought were going to be individual elegies dedicated to lost friends, turned out to be a love letter about what it means to inhabit, and eventually lose, a human body.

The idea that the people around you define you, that they make you whole, that their presence gives you something to push against or a place to lean on, made me think about what happens when they're gone. You become undefined, a vague shape.

So after all that, I expected it to end on a sad note. Only it didn't.

It ends with a blank. A blank space in a paper you have to fill out. The blank becomes flesh, and then that flesh moves. It grabs and it pulls.
The body moves because something else is there to respond to it. The self is shaped by contact.

Even if the ending isn't replacing what was lost, it says becoming something new is possible. Someone pulls, someone pulls back. And life keeps going.


**Thank you FSG Poetry and NetGalley for the early copy. All opinions are my own.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

📚 Pre-read 📚
I found it mighty appropriate to read a book about the 80s AIDS crisis during Pride month.
I also know I will be a wrecked mess after I finish it.

*Thom Gunn wrote this collection of poems as elegy for the friends he lost to AIDS. He was an openly gay man who stayed HIV negative, while his friends didn’t.

**This collection was originally published in 1992, but it will be the first time this edition will be available in digital format.

NetGalley ARC

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are things about his style I didn't love, but the way the poems all come together to paint a picture of what life was like for Thom Gunn is the mid to late 80s is powerful. Not gonna lie, several of these poems made me teary.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thom Gunn's excellent verses in The Man with Night Sweats qualify him as the Poet Laureate for the AIDS crisis. This would be an unwanted honor for the poet, but the need for these brilliant poems is great, as they ensure that the events of that sorrowful era will remain accessible to students of history and literature into the future. There are other themes and subjects in these multi-layered poems; some of my favorites are, 'The Hug,' 'To Isherwood Dying,' 'The Stealer,' and 'All Do Not All Things Well." But the fourth and final section of poems contains closely and personally observed descriptions of the suffering of AIDS patients. 'Words for Some Ash,' is a powerful poem about the transformation of a man into ash that is absorbed by soil and then washes into the sea. There is a sad, understated awareness of what is lost in 'The J Car,' about one of Gunn's graduate students, Charles Hinckle: He knew he would not write the much-conceived / much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create / A love he might in full reciprocate. In another poem, 'Memory Unsettled,' we hear what a dying friend wants most of all: When near your death a friend / Asked you what he could do, / ‘Remember me,’ you said. / We will remember you.

Gunn's use of poetry's formal mechanics is an effective partner to the emotional control he exhibits. The result is a devastating sequence of poems in which the sense of loss and waste is impossible to overlook.

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

The standout pieces in this collection are undoubtedly the series of poems towards the end about the deaths of friends from AIDS. Incredibly profound, and the reason I wanted to read this collection.

So then, I also discovered some other wonderful poems such as ‘Tenderloin’, ‘Meat’ and the wonderful ‘Jamesian’, a two line summery of Henry James:

“Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.”

Thom Gunn was a gay man living through the AIDS pandemic and his work here in this collection gives us a direct line to the horror of that period, conveyed with compassion, dignity and grace. It’s an incredibly moving body of work that anyone interested in queer literature and history should not neglect.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

Memory Unsettled

Your pain still hangs in the air,
Sharp motes of it suspended;
The voice of your despair —
That also is not ended:

When near your death a friend
Asked you what he could do,
'Remember me,' you said.
We will remember you.

Once when you went to see
Another with a fever
In a like hospital bed,
With terrible hothouse cough
And terrible hothouse shiver
That soaked him and then dried him,
And you perceived that he
Had to be comforted,

You climbed in there beside him
And hugged him plain in view,
Though you were sick enough
And had your own fears too.

Now here's a complicated trip into memory land. Pre-queer, post initial GR dive, where I assumed my interest in a work such as this was as impersonally vague as was my commitment to that long ago engineering track. Now I come to this piece at the close of queer pride and the beginning of disability pride, which is as fitting a time as any to meditate on a collection of poems where AIDS is as Hamlet's father's ghost. Once again, excuse my lackluster appreciation of the more metered side of reading, but after how well Ted Hughes went, I may just be selling my extremely particular tastes short. It's not as if I can't sympathize, especially with the past year of cancer continuing to wring out my heart's blood, but Gunn does come equipped with both Wiki page and father figure swathed in blue upon it, and the manner in which he accessories his Bright Young Things with the non-white and the non-sane smacks of the same self-idolatry as do the tech town buses winding their way through the Tenderloin. It's not quite the scene in Netflix's Tales from the City spin off where a bunch of old white men tell a young Black man that he has no right to tell them to not hurl transphobic slurs due to how he couldn't possibly understand what it was like to witness his community cut out from under him over and over while the government watches, popcorn in hand, but there was enough for me to dwell upon it. An ungrateful viewpoint, perhaps, but these days, it's better to practice biting the hand that feeds, lest you get front row seats to watching the other hand choke the lights out of your neighbor right in front of your dinner plate.

In any case, this was short, and if you want to read a gay author writing about gay themes who managed to wring a favorable review from Updike of all people, here's your carefully cultivated classic form with the spice of a diverse urban added when needed. It only really worked for me once, but better than never having worked at all, and a fitting end to a, in hindsight, rather fraught time in my life, wherein I was desperately reading to fit in without having any idea of what, exactly, was fitting for me.

Some of the poems in this book refer to friends who died before their time. For the record — for my record if for no one else's, because they were not famous people — I wish to name them here: 'The Reassurance' and 'Lament' are about Allan Noseworthy; 'Terminal' and 'Words for some Ash', Jim Lay; 'Still Life', Larry Hoyt; 'To the Dead Owner of a Gym' and 'Courtesies of the Interregnum', Norm Rathweg; 'Memory Unsettled', 'To a Dead Graduate Student' and 'The J Car', CHarlie Hinkle, lines from whose Poems are quoted as an epigraph to Part 4. Two more, Lonnie Leard and Allen Day, enter less directly into other poems.

[Sam Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally entering this onto Goodreads because I have finished my deepest close read of every single poem for my honours thesis and realized I haven't marked this as read yet. Expect my review to come in the form of a 25-page essay on the Erotics of Sweat and the queering of death in a few months 🤌

But in brief, this collection of poetry may be the most emotionally devastating and cohesive collection of poems I have ever encountered. Thom Gunn is probably the most underrated english poet of the twentieth-century and one who deserves to be much more read than he currently is. Gunn chronicles the tragedy and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic and the lives it touched with such precision and tenacity that his words resonate far beyond the context they emerge from. These poems speak of intimacy, love, corporeality, devotion, guilt, humanity, and survival in such shocking clarity that they're almost uncomfortable to behold. It's a disservice to the dead and to yourself to look away, however. These are words that reverberate. I'm still trying to find my footing.

[Angus Meek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know, I know I liked this book (though I found it uneven), but I'm always at a loss as to how to review poetry. Even if I'm supposedly working towards becoming a literary scholar, and one who frequently teaches poetry, I suppose I tend to have a sort of visceral reaction to something or I react not at all. Either way, these are affective and not necessarily intellectual responses. I'll say one critique though: Gunn's rigid formalism seems to be a real double-edged sword for this collection: at times, it manages to retrieve his more emotional portraits of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from maudlin-"Philadelphia" style tearjerkers; at others, his insistence on clear rhyme schemes or metered lines leads the poetry into a kind of facile tone, or one that feels more weightless than it should, if that makes any sense. Not that it's being silly, but that it begins to be a bit like cotton candy; it's there for a moment of pleasure and then dissolves into nothingness, leaving no memory behind it. The first and fourth parts were my personal favorites, though I need to go back and close read some of the specific pieces for my field exam soon. Perhaps an update to this review then.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read "Death's Door," the second-to-last poem. Holy shit, what an awesome poem. Funny and weird and heartbreaking. Five stars just for that. The rest of the book is great, too.

[Erofili · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just incredible. The fourth section of poems were heart wrenching and I was tearing up for most of them. 'Lament' crushed me, and was definitely a standout one for me but each poem held its own. Beautiful and profound.

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Thom Gunn's most famous and acclaimed poetry collection, nearly 40 years after his debut. I found it in the same vain as his other works, there is some good stuff and some okay, then there some moments when it doesn't seem like he's holding back, where it's easy to see how he made his name, but the whole effect is uneven. This may be his most famous work but I don't think it's his best. Highlights ~ "The Hug" "The Differences" "A Sketch of the Great Dejection" "Patch Work" "Improvisation" "Yellow Pitcher Plant" "Looks" "All Do Not All Things Well" "The Man with the Night Sweats" "In Time of Plague" "Lament" "Sacred Heart" and "Death's Door".

[Eli Levén · Rating 4 out of 5]

Iblaand häpnadsväckande säker, formmässigt och ämnesmässigt. Serving Shakespeares sonetter tbh! Giving John Donne tycker jag.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Thom Gunn collection I have read: his name is one I've been familiar with for a long time, but it took a recent London Review of Books article to make me finally devle into his work. Although I found this collection uneven, there are many striking or important things in it. The Man With Night Sweats begins with poems about ageing, about San Francisco of the 1980s, about homelessness, and family. Mostly using long lines, and always using rhyme, these poem give an entertaining, and sometimes moving or insightful, account of these themes. The final section focuses on the AIDS epidemic, and contains descriptions of sickness and death, as well as elegies on particular men, and an exploration of grief. By beginning the book on reasonably firm ground -- the normal matters of ageing and change -- the desolation of AIDS is made more stark, because it shows the suddenness and destruction of an unexpected epidemic. The context of these poems makes them particularly moving, but Thom Gunn's gentle rhymes and careful observation of character serve him well to create moving but accessible elegies that give us a window into loss. I will continue reading his work.

[Owen Townend · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was first intrigued by Gunn's poetic style when his poem Reassurance appeared in a anthology I recently read. Picking up his first collection, The Man with Night Sweats, I continue to be impressed.

There is a tenderness to his verse style (which often employs iambic pentameter and 'ABAB' end rhymes) which appeals to me. Though I do not know what it feels like to be a gay man during the AIDs crisis, losing friends and lovers in quick succession; The Man with Night Sweats helped me to understand the pain and resignation involved. That being said, I definitely connected most with the poems focusing on hospital visits and the regret that comes with watching a loved one die.

Which isn't to say that this collection is primarily focused on illness and death. Gunn also contemplates comfort touches, romantic relationships and even pithy observations on the natural world. Regardless of the subject matter, his scansion is clean, his word choice accessible and his message beautiful. If I spy any more collections by Gunn out in the wild, I will surely grab them.

For now though I recommend The Man with Night Sweats to those who want to read compassionate poetry about love, nature, sickness and death.

Notable Poems

• Yellow Pitcher Plant - I have never before read such a gorgeously-worded depiction of fly-eating plants.

• Jamesian - yes, this is a two-line poem but captures Henry James' writing and how some couples overthink.

• Still Life - this verse conveys the sombre acceptance of seeing a loved one on oxygen when it isn't working.

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My body insisted on restlessness
having been promised love,
as my mind insisted on words
having been promised the imagination.”

This collection is a gorgeous exercise in formal containment as Gunn traverses the heartbreaking terrain of the AIDS crisis and its aftermath. Both love and loss abound in this book, to beautiful ends.

[Cory · Rating 4 out of 5]

"May you lastly reach the shore,
Joining tide without intent,
Only worried any more
By the currents' argument."
—"Words for Some Ash"

A haunting, somber collection of Thom Gunn's farewells to his dying friends and neighbors in San Francisco during the AIDS years. This collection fully embraces the antiquated conventions of Metaphysical poetry, which Gunn loved and aspired to emulate, and still retains his startlingly modern way of reading the world. At once heartening, breathtaking, and devastating to read now.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

'As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off.'

[Christopher Louderback · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gunn’s language is at once fragile and relentless, devastating and hopeful, beautiful and filthy — poetry refreshing in its directness, a kind of choreographed stab in the heart, and when the blade is pulled out you’re eager to push it back in.

[Gudrun Palomino · Rating 5 out of 5]

me lo recomendó un señor de 80 años del que me hice amiga

tenía razón

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my introduction to the poetry of Thom Gunn, and I was a little disappointed based on his reputation. Even the memorial poems in the latter half of this volume are mostly lifeless, with the exception of "The J Car", which manages to evoke some real feeling as it remembers a friend in his last days of succumbing to HIV/AIDS.

I do admire Gunn's use of more formal metrical structures in some of these poems, but in the end the words just don't manage to connect with me as a reader, even though some of the subjects that Gunn tackles do intersect with my own experiences and relationships. Perhaps if I revisit this volume at a later stage of life it might have more of an impact.

[Roy Kesey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little looser than I'd guessed, more air in the joints, but there are some amazing knots of meaning. At times I felt left out of its intimacies, and much of the language was not particularly interesting. But the death poems – section 4 – are for the most part amazingly strong.

[I. Merey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Athletic and graceful poetry.

Some of them were so sorrowful. I read this so slowly, enjoying it slowly spreading, sinking in.

[Bek (MoonyReadsByStarlight) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Man With The Night Sweats paints a vivid picture of community and isolation in 1980s San Fransisco. Overwhelming melancholy may brush against hope at times, but you can feel the shadow over everything. Most of the poems overtly about AIDS are in the last chapter, but the specter is present in each chapter. There were individual poems that were good, some that I felt less strongly about - but more than that, the collection as a whole is so intentionally curated. That flow and structure, the build up to that last chapter, makes this collection that much more powerful.

I have more thought and feelings about it, but over all, this was an incredible book.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gunn had an elegant style and many of the AIDs era poems capture the scary sadness and loss of those years. I came of age in the AIDs crisis and lost two cousins to that nasty
disease so I found the collection evocative of that deadly time.

His style works with everything and yet is also a bit repetitive. Nothing stood out in this collection but maybe with such a subject matter that is the point.

[Rahiya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did enjoy some part of this book - maybe the final sections? However, I do feel as though overall it was quite forgettable and that Gunn’s commitment to form came with the disappointing sacrifice of a vivid/lively language. I enjoyed the more mundane reports of everyday living in this collection, but I do feel that there was an ambitious spirit that maybe didn’t feel appropriate for the nostalgia and grief that the content of the collection is actually concerned with…

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is a brilliant and sad image of the AIDS pneumonia plague of the 80s. Talk of the dead human chain AIDS resulted into then, and you shall feel it.

“Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.”

[adele · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m WAAAAA WAAA WAAA WAAAAAA BEEUHHHHHwwwwAAAA bweeegghhhhhhh BWEEGGGHHB WAIIIIIHHHH Blegggg

[ela begüm · Rating 4 out of 5]

rating - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I wrote this on the eponymous poem, but the others are good to.

Thom Gunn vividly conveys his feelings of shame, weakness, and wistfulness for the past about his body in “The Man With Night Sweats” through imagery likening his body to his physical barrier that is eventually broken down, using metaphorical images of heat and coldness to contrast his deteriorating health to that in the past, and through uses of pacing and rhyming in various areas of the poem.
Thom Gunn vividly conveys his feelings of shame, weakness, and wistfulness for the past about his body through imagery of physical barriers. The image comparing his body to a shield is used to contrast his body in his past to his body now and show his weakness and inability to prevent danger from his illness in the present. In line 5, Thom Gunn calls “[his] flesh [his] own shield”, and this metaphor of a shield is reused in line 14, “[his] given shield” now having been “cracked”, and finally in line 21 as a transitive verb, utilised in the phrase “as if to shield [his body] from/the pains that will go through [him]. “ The image of the “shield” represents his physical strength, as shields are often associated with protection, specifically during warfare, creating the image of a war against his illness. As his shield becomes “cracked”, it could represent his inability to recover from his “pains”, as well as a vulnerability to other, perhaps mental, struggles, as a crack indicates a hole through which weapons, or other struggles, can strike him. This warfare imagery suggests that he is susceptible to being killed, creating a sense of physical danger and an inability to repair himself, as his “given shield [is] cracked”, and he is now unable to use his body as a barrier against potential danger. The usage of the words “as if” at the beginning of line 21 suggest that he is unable to prevent the dangers that may befall him and creates a sense of doom at the end of the poem, forming a dark atmosphere and conveying a feeling of weakness in the face of a disease which appears so monstrous and unpredictable to him. The imagery of knights and explorers, traditionally courageous occupations, in describing his past courageousness, highlights his body’s past capabilities and allows the reader to associate these traits with his body previously, allowing there to be a starker contrast between his current emotions about his body and those in his past. The “shield” is often associated with knighthood and chivalry, and the image of an “explorer” in “I grew as I explored/the body” implies that he had an adventurous and curious past. Additionally, “each challenge to the skin” reminds one of a knight, as knights often had to fight for their honour and their love with bravery. A “shield” relates the narrator’s youth to a knight’s, and knights are often faced with challenges and grow from these challenges, as he did. An “explore[r]” discovers new lands, showing how the narrator was discovering new features of his body and the changing world around him. The enjambment in lines 7-8 also creates a double-entendre, as reading line 7 independently creates the image of the narrator exploring his own body, whilst the entire phrase read together shows how he was exploring other bodies, signifying how he was exploring sexually during this time. This double meaning adds depth to the narrator’s emotions, as he is shown as exploring others’ as well as his own body and experiencing new things. Both images are positive, contrasting starkly with the dark images of the “cracked” “shield” in line 14, indicating a shift in his physical health and his ability to interact with and explore the world around him, and creating a confined atmosphere in the second half of the poem as opposed to the free and explorative imagery used in stanzas 2-4.

Thom Gunn vividly conveys his feelings of shame and wistfulness for his past body through the repetition of imagery about coldness and heat throughout the poem. The warmth associated with his dreams allows the reader to create comparisons of his past to a dreamlike state, and the present to a harsh reality. The “dreams of heat” mentioned in line 2 could be interpreted as having a double meaning, a sense of both his illness, which causes his night sweats and also possibly dreams of sexual arousal. This allows the reader to intrinsically connect the sexual experiences which caused his illness and their devastating consequences, and create a contrast between his dream state and his reality. His dream is intentionally mentioned without any explanation, as to make it a metaphor for his past, through which the reader can project notions of youth and courage onto him, as many pieces of literature compare the sweet innocence and exploration of youth to a dream, and the harshness of adulthood to waking up from it. Through this lens, the narrator’s current emotional state could be interpreted as lonely and wistful for his past, as his past comes back to him even in his dreams, yet he wakes up alone in his own bed. Through this image of the dream, Thom Gunn shows how the narrator feels the loss of a more potent version of himself, and an image of a desperate person clinging to the shell of something that used to bring him hope. The image of an avalanche highlights both the futility of the narrator’s efforts to hold off the future, as well as creating potent images of death and of an intimate struggle between him and his body. In lines 23-24 of the poem, Thom Gunn creates a hauntingly pessimistic image of the narrator’s future with the words, “As if hands were enough/To hold an avalanche off”. The image of an avalanche creates a sense of the magnitude and weight of his disease, and the futility of his trying to escape it, as an avalanche is a natural disaster that cannot be predicted or prevented. Additionally, the fact that an avalanche is cold, and will eventually bury him, is symbolic of how this disease eventually leads to a painful and inevitable death. The contrast of the coldness of the avalanche and the heat of the dreams of the narrator’s past also highlights the futility of his current situation, as well as commenting on the unpredictable nature of death and the unforeseeable consequences of his actions. The repeated usage of “as if” also emphasises that his hands on his head are not enough to hold off this avalanche of pain he must endure, and creates a visceral reaction in the reader as a response to his raw emotion and the weakness of his efforts. In the extended metaphor of the war he is fighting, it could be interpreted that the narrator realises at the end that his efforts are futile, and he is fighting a losing war, and the inevitability of the “avalanche”, and therefore his death, eventually crushing him. The fact that this last stanza stands alone at the end of the page in a couplet represents how he is alone in his struggle, as his disease makes others scared to interact with him, as well as creating a sense of how little and easy he is to crush in the wake of such an unprecedentedly large epidemic, such as AIDS, or the struggle against ageing, which is another possible interpretation of the poem.
Thom Gunn vividly conveys his feelings of wistfulness for his old body through the pacing and rhyming in several areas of the poem. The continuous fluidity of the section about the narrator’s past body between lines 7-12 shows how he explored his identity in a constantly changing world and creates a sharp contrast between his old and new selves. The continuous enjambment between these lines allows the reader to read faster, as the lack of punctuation allows the whole sentence to blur into a single reading experience without a pause, allowing the narrator’s past experiences to appear in a blur, as they possibly appear in the mind of the narrator, who is experiencing a deterioration in his mind. The lack of punctuation could represent how the good memories of his past are fluid in his mind and racing through it, showing how he yearns passionately for his past and seeks escapism in it when he is alone and facing his struggles. The use of transitive verbs in this section, such as “explored”, “grew”, and “adored”, compared to the use of intransitive verbs in the last four stanzas when he is focusing on the present, such as “reduced”, “cracked”, and “wrecked”, show the shift of control over his own mind and body, as well as the autonomy he used to possess over his body when he was healthy. This also creates the sense of his body letting him down, as “gr[owth]” is a symbol of maturing and increasing in experiences and health, whereas the idea of “reducing” shows how his body is deteriorating, and how he feels shame for the lack of control he possesses over it. Thom Gunn vividly portrays his feelings of his body and mind being broken down through the deterioration of the rhyme scheme in the final two stanzas. In the first four stanzas, the rhyme scheme is in ABAB CC form, repeating consistently with full rhymes such as “heat” and “sheet”, or “shield” and “healed”. However, as his condition deteriorates as the poem moves into the present in stanzas 5-7, the rhymes start to become half-rhymes and lack rhythmic regularity, emphasising how his mental state is deteriorating rapidly, evidenced by his inability to find words that rhyme, and signalling both his intellectual and physical failure. Moreover, the lacklustre rhymes represent the degradation of his physicality through the degradation of the look and sound of the words on the page, showing how his body is failing him as the rhyme scheme fails near the end of the poem. At the very end, in the eighth stanza, there is barely a half-rhyme, with Thom Gunn rhyming “enough” and “off”, which have only the “f” fricative sound in common, showing how he is so “reduced” at this point that he is almost unable to write any sort of rhyming into the final stanza, foreshadowing how his body will be unable to function in the future, and creating a terrifying image of his future, and his eventual death.
The imagery that compares his body to a physical barrier, the use of metaphorical images of heat and coldness, and the use of pacing and rhyming in various parts of "The Man With Night Sweats" allow Thom Gunn to vividly convey his feelings of shame, weakness, and nostalgia for the past about his body. Another image which represents his death is the imagery of his cold sheets and his bed, which could represent the final bed he must go to soon, which is his cold tomb, or his deathbed.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 4 out of 5]

if it was tad bit more about AIDS it would’ve been better imo, otherwise the focus is a bit lost