The Man with Night Sweats: Analysis

 

'The Man with The Night Sweats' is a poem written by Thom Gunn in 1992. He created this lyric to draw attention to the problem of the AIDS epidemic, who took some of his close friends. In this post I will try to analyse this poem.

'The Man with Night Sweats' is eight stanzas long and divided into stanzas of two or four lines (couplets or quatrains). The poem's couplets and quatrains all fallow to the same basic rhyme scheme, ABAB CC.(Baldwin, 2020)

In first stanza 

I wake up cold, I who

Prospered through dreams of heat   

Wake to their residue,   

Sweat, and a clinging sheet.   

My flesh was its own shield:   

Where it was gashed, it healed.

References:

Foundation, P. (2021). The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn. [online] Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47956/the-man-with-night-sweats [Accessed 13 Feb. 2024].

Baldwin, E. (2020). The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn. [online] Poem Analysis. Available at: https://poemanalysis.com/thom-gunn/the-man-with-night-sweats/ [Accessed 13 Feb. 2024].

Saharay, R. (2023). The Man With Night Sweats: Analysis and Poetic Devices. [online] The Literary Companion. Available at: https://igcseenglish.com/2023/01/20/the-man-with-night-sweats/ [Accessed 13 Feb. 2024].

Spacey, A. (2023). Analysis of the Poem ‘The Man With Night Sweats’ by Thom Gunn. [online] Owlcation. Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-The-Man-With-Night-Sweats-by-Thom-Gunn [Accessed 13 Feb. 2024].