"In Time of Plague" - Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn was born and raise in England. He was praised early on in England as a poet and at the age of twenty-five moved to the United States. While here, he wrote about crude and controversial topics uncommon in poetry. 

In Time of Plague by Thom Gunn

My thoughts are crowded with death

and it draws so oddly on the sexual

that I am confused

confused to be attracted

by, in effect, my own annihilation.

Who are these two, these fiercely attractive men

who want me to stick their needle in my arm?

They tell me they are called Brad and John,

one from here, one from Denver, sitting the same

on the bench as they talk to me,

their legs spread apart, their eyes attentive.

I love their daring, their looks, their jargon,

and what they have in mind.

Their mind is the mind of death.

They know it, and do not know it,

and they are like me in that

(I know it, and do not know it)

and like the flow of people through this bar.

Brad and John thirst heroically together

for euphoria--for a state of ardent life

in which we could all stretch ourselves

and lose our differences. I seek 

to enter their minds: am I fool,

and they direct and right, properly

testing themselves against risk,

as a human must, and does,

or are they the fools, their alert faces

mere death's heads lighted glamorously?

I weigh possibilities

till I am afraid of the strength

of my own health

and of their evident health.

They get restless at last with my indecisiveness

and so, first one, and then the other,

move off into the moving concourse of people

who are boisterous and bright

carrying in their faces and throughout their bodies

the news of life and death.

This poem vividly expresses a disturbed yet harsh tone. This structure of this poem helps build upon the tone. This poem is written extremely jagged, never completing a full thought in a single line. This causes the reader to jump back and forth with ideas creating a sort of harshness to the poem. Also, this inconsistency also compliments the speaker's  confusion and indecisiveness. Whenever death is mentioned, people immediately jump to the conclusion that the poem has a grave tone, which is also true about this poem but there is also more. By simply looking at the title we assume this poem is about pain and suffering. "Plague" has a connotation of being something horrid and disastrous.  However, after reading the first two lines in the poem we are given a shock. The speaker talks about death and how "it draws so oddly on the sexual." Most of the time when somebody is talking about death, the last thing that should come to mind is sex. The speaker is confronted by two "fiercely attractive gay men who want him to shoot up some heroine. The speaker is face with a problem with peer pressure. He/she wants to try the drug but is battling the possibility of his own annihilation. According to the speaker, this two gay men carry the news of life and death. at any one point, a person may be perfectly health and the next, be found dead on the floor with a needle in his arm.This creates a sense of mystery and confusion that is present throughout the text.