Understanding Memory Unsettled by Thom Gunn?

Answer 1

An elegy for a victim of AIDS who, during his final illness, conferred a comforting embrace on a friend more sick than he.

Taken from a collection of somber poems about the AIDS epidemic, called "The Man with Night Sweats" (1992), it was written in memory of graduate student, Charlie Hinkle.

Your pain still hangs in 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.

For a brief but perceptive comment on Thom Gunn as poet, see the website listed below. [1] "Unlike many of his contemporaries, . . . who began with conventional forms and switched exclusively to free verse, Gunn continued to work in metre too."

Interestingly enough, in this late poem, "Memory Unsettled," which is unabashedly humane and emotional, he continues to combine everyday, colloquial language with traditional poetic form. Beginning with a simple rhymed quatrain (ABAB), he lets the rhymes become less pronounced and the language less elevated in the second stanza. Then he appears to abandon the quatrain and rhymes altogether in the highly charged third stanza, a double quatrain (with its "terrible hothouse cough," "terrible hothouse fever"). But even here there are subtle half-rhymes (fever/shiver) as well as the separated rhymes (see/he; bed/comforted). In the calm but climactic last stanza he returns, resigned, to the rhymed quatrain (but this time ABCB). These subtle shifts in form only emphasize the simplicity of the style and the depth of feeling embodied in the poem.

Reading it aloud, one can see why this poem has been set to music by two of America's most noted contemporary composers, Ned Rorem and David Del Tredici

Gunn died quietly of a heart attack on April 25, 2004, survived by his companion of more than fifty years.

Among memorable poems of the 20th century are two of Gunn's, about motorcyclists, "On the Move" and "Black Jackets." [2, 3] The latter, a favorite of mine, I have been teaching for over 50 years. It speaks for a whole post-WWII generation.

If it was only loss he wore,
He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,
Complicity and nothing more.
He recollected his initiation,

And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:
The group's name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.

Answer 2

sorry no idea