What's about Moly(by Thom Gunn) and what's its thought?

Question

Moly

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man's servile friend,

......
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=13145&page=2

Answer 1

The Sand Man
This poem comes from Moly (1971). When Ulysses and his men (in Homer's Odyssey) are turned into swine by Circe, the magic herb Moly restores them to their human shape. It is clear that Gunn has used this as a metaphor for the power of mind-expanding drugs (chiefly LSD) to raise one's spiritual awareness. In many of the poems (including the title piece) Gunn refers to this power - this makes the work seem both controversial and a product of its time and place. It seems, however, that (whether in spite of, or because of these drugs) Gunn has achieved a clear vision of universal charity, which characterizes the best of the poems. These have no psychedelic overtones, but remain powerful proclamations of enduring human values.

The Sand Man, like The Vigil of Corpus Christi, is about a man who has dropped out of conventional society, but there the similarities end. The poem depicts a man, who, instead of seeking some way to live with dignity and purpose, has retreated from this challenge into the security of a child-like oneness with the natural world. He has almost become an animal. It is worth contrasting this poem with the excellent The Discovery of the Pacific, in which Gunn shows how one can draw close to nature without losing one's human consciousness. Gunn views the Sand Man with sympathy, but this man's drastic response to his problems is no answer for the rest of us.


The Discovery of the Pacific
This is the penultimate poem in Moly and one of the very best of Gunn's pieces. Gunn habitually places at the beginning or end of a collection, poems which most strongly reflect his own outlook, which, as we have seen, changes over the years. The poem seems to be a simple narrative about a couple who drive to the ocean, using the sun as their compass. Unlike the very bombastic On the Move, this poem uses everyday vocabulary, yet in it, Gunn simultaneously creates several layers of meaning. The poem is extremely economical, and repays the reader who is prepared to re-read it.

The journey of the couple in the poem is in part a mythic recreation of the great pioneering journeys westward of the first white settlers of what is now the U.S.A. It is also a poem about the discovery of peace: the couple's inner peace, peace with each other and peace with their natural surroundings.

In this poem (as in nearly all the poems in Moly) Gunn returns to the iambic line, favouring the pentameter here. Can you show how the line is more fluent than in the early poems, following the detour into syllabics. How and why is the final line different from all the others in the poem?


Sunlight
Where The Discovery of the Pacific does rather ambitious things almost by stealth, under the cover of a simple tale, this poem deals explicitly with abstractions and generalizations, that make the argument less easy, in a superficial way, to follow. The relationship of the sun to the lesser lights and energies of our world becomes a symbol of the universal human love by which our own little lights of charity are inspired. Gunn concedes that this love will not last for ever (the solar system “is both imperfect and deteriorating”) but will “outlast us at the heart”. This is the nearest to perfection that man can draw: to see and participate in this universal love.

The poem ends with two stanzas which are a prayer to the sun to enable man to transcend his petty limitations and “kindle...petals of light” around the greater light (love) of the sun. Though the poem wrestles with such profound mysteries of human experience, it does so with more ease and fluency than the earlier On the Move. This is partly due to the poem's central image, and partly to the poet's argument. Sunlight, rather than the aimless movement of motorcyclists, seems a more accessible image. Gunn is novel in using the motorcyclists as a source of metaphor. With this image of sunlight he draws on a wealth of already existing associations. The poem's concluding celebration of universal charity ultimately seems more attractive than the slick but doubtful assertion in the earlier piece that one is “always nearer by not keeping still”.

And more persuasive, too: after Moly, Gunn did not publish any work of equal note, until the catastrophe of AIDS (for Gunn a public and private catastrophe, as the disease has claimed so many of his friends) prompted his publication of The Man with Night Sweats. It is almost as if Sunlight is a definitive and eloquent statement of the poet's outlook on which it is impossible for Gunn to improve. Equally, it is as if, in his case, this has become an absolute position “in which to rest ”, and that “not keeping still ”is no longer true of his poetic outlook.