In Time of Plauge

         The famous textbook Understanding Poetry promoted the idea of new criticism which restricted students from considering historical and personal significance while analizing a poem. However in most works including Thom Gunn’s In Time of Plague, knowing the time period of the poem is crucial to understand its meaning .

To get at the poem’s emotional center you have you put yourself as a gay man during the late 80’s/early 90’s whose community is suddenly infected with this new deadly disease. The speaker tells us the psychological impact the AIDS epidemic had on his social life. He explains how sexual desire and the fear of death have become strangely intertwined. In line 7 he describes potential sexual partners as men who “want to stick their needle in my arm.” This is a both a metaphor for sex and a reference to the heavy drug use of 1980's gay nightlife. These bars would allow an opportunity for drug abuse and unprotected sex. The two men, Jon and Brad, are given very cliché and generic names to give the feeling that they are just typical bar types who he would normally have sex with without deep consideration.

These men “thirst heroically together for euphoria”.  The language used in lines 21-26 describes search for sex as and grand and important quest. In this “quest” he is able to “enter their minds” as they “lose their differences” together. Then he abruptly goes back to the fear of death. This relates to how AIDS brought a somber halt to their free spirited and promiscuous attitudes. He starts talking about how he fears for my own health and of their evident health”, “health” referring to rather or not they were infected. In the last line he describes the bar patrons as “boisterous and bright carrying in their faces and throughout their bodies the news of life and death.”  In their faces the speaker can see both thier bright human nature and signs of sickness and death.


Works Cited:
    Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10thth ed. New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011. 478-479. Print.