Thom Gunn – “From the Wave”, “Still Life”, “The Missing”

“From the Wave” is a description of surfers, written in a regular 8-4-8-4 quatrains. It vaguely reminds me of a Romantic poem, but I could not remember which one, and both Google and various AI search engines really fail to give answers. (AI sucks at analysing poetry, BTW, even at the most basic level as counting verses and syllables.) It’s also not really the common metre of the English ballad or hymn, because there the even lines are 6 syllables long. So I’ll let this matter rest and instead focus on the poem, which describes in detail the wave rising and the surfers emerging, balancing upon the wave in a way that they seemingly learned from the wave itself. Indeed, they become “half wave, half men”, until they slide down its face to the shore, and after some paddling they swim out to the sea again. There is a real Wordsworthian vibe about this poem, with men becoming one with nature.

The last two poems are much darker, since they come from the collection The Man with Night Sweats published in the 1980s and dealing with the AIDS epidemic. “Still Life” is an ambiguous title, because “still life” is an art history term for paintings of artfully composed objects. But it is also a description of the poet’s friend on a hospital bed and thus could be read as “he continued to live” or “he was not moving, but still alive”. The poet describes in regular rhyming stanzas the dying man, his greyish-yellow skin and how he seemed not to be himself anymore, apart from the breath he could not still give up “as a life-long breather”, as he puts it ironically, and the breathing tube in his mouth gives his face an astonished look.

“The Missing” is also a formally traditional poem in iambic pentameter quatrains. The poet thinks about his dying or dead friends and imagines himself as a half-finished statue. He felt he was a part of a community, friends of friends, and one could also add, lovers of lovers, because though the poem is not explicit, it uses sexualised metaphors such as “supple entwinement” or “unlimited embrace”. It’s not only sex he received from his community: “Their push kept me as firm as their support”. Now with so many friends dead he feels less-defined, like this half-finished statue, “abandoned incomplete”.