A Reticent Eloquence: Colm Tóibín on the Poetry of Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn, a poet born in 1929 and active until his death in 2004, examined the work of sixteenth-century poet Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1991. Gunn highlighted Wyatt’s elegies—poems of mourning for friends executed alongside Anne Boleyn—emphasizing their emotional power and understated style. Gunn noted how Wyatt’s lines, such as 'The axe is home, your heads be in the street,' use plain language to intensify horror, making executions feel like routine events. Gunn’s focus on Wyatt’s control over complex emotions and precise diction reveals his own interest in the traditions of poetic lament. This analysis reflects Gunn’s broader engagement with how poets manage grief through formal techniques, a theme that later appears in his own elegies.

Gunn frequently explored the human body in his poetry, particularly its strength and vulnerability. In his 1992 collection The Man with Night Sweats, he directly addresses physical decline, often linked to illness. The title poem contrasts the poet’s past health ('I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat') with present suffering, using short, Anglo-Saxon-derived words for directness. Gunn’s imagery, such as 'My flesh was its own shield,' dramatizes the body as a battleground. In other poems, he describes the loss of vitality, as in 'Courtesies of the Interregnum,' where a once-strong body softens due to illness. These themes reflect Gunn’s lifelong fascination with the body’s resilience and fragility.

Gunn’s elegies in The Man with Night Sweats are stark and unadorned, differing from his earlier formal poetry. He employs simple rhymes and rhythms to convey raw emotion, occasionally embracing awkwardness—a quality he admired in Thomas Hardy’s work. The poems avoid ornamentation, using plain language to memorialize friends who died during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, where Gunn found happiness. His style balances personal grief with impersonal control, as seen in lines like 'The trickling tears doth fall so from mine eyes,' which mimic the restraint of Wyatt’s elegies. This approach creates a 'reticent eloquence,' where emotion is channeled into precise, ceremonial language.

Gunn’s elegies are not just personal tributes but also monuments to communal sorrow. Many of his friends died in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, a time when the disease was often fatal. Gunn’s poems reflect this shared grief, using impersonal language to universalize loss. He cites T. S. Eliot’s idea that artists do not create in isolation, suggesting these elegies capture a broader experience of mourning. Gunn’s method involves suppressing his own voice to focus on the deceased, as he noted in his analysis of Thomas Hardy’s poems about his late wife. The result is a poetic style that feels both intimate and detached, honoring the dead while acknowledging collective pain.