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    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing"
    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing"
    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing"
    Ebook35 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535838443
    A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "The Missing" - Gale

      1

      The Missing

      Thom Gunn

      1997

      Introduction

      Completed in 1997, Thom Gunn’s The Missing takes its place among the most eloquent and poignant testaments to have arisen from the literature of AIDS. Part elegy, part rueful meditation, the poem is told from the perspective of the survivor, one who has been left behind in the wake of a string of senseless deaths. Here, the speaker faces an uncertain and sorely compromised future stripped of the loving support of the friends on whom he has come to rely so heavily. And yet, more than a confrontation of the mystery and irrationality of death, the poem explores the extent to which society influences and shapes the individual. It celebrates the meaningful connections and lasting ties that punctuate a life and often outlive it in the realm of memory.

      The Missing first appeared in Gunn’s 1992 collection, The Man with Night Sweats. As its title declares, the AIDS crisis is one of its central preoccupations. Night sweats are one of the symptoms of AIDS and often come as a harrowing harbinger of a yet undiagnosed disease that has already taken up residence in the body. Clearly, this grim and visceral detail indicates a book that is honest in its unsentimental portraits of lives cut short and of people languishing in their prime.

      In addition, the poem displays another hallmark of Gunn’s poetry: a complex and seamlessly rendered formal structure. Written in iambic pentameter and adopting an abab rhyme scheme, The Missing is a unique example of a traditional, formal poem taking a contemporary theme as its subject. Rhythmic form and subject-matter are locked in a permanent embrace, Gunn writes in an essay expressing his theories of poetics, and the embrace is an image that recurs throughout Gunn’s work and figures centrally in The Missing. It is an image of both friendship and desire, two sources of empowerment and identity. But it also an image with the dark shadow of death looming over it,

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