Explication of "The Man with Night Sweats"

Thom Gunn’s poem “The Man with Night Sweats,” gives a vivid account of an individual suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and their experiencing an evening of sweating. The speaker describes waking up “cold,” throwing the reader into the uncomfortable and sudden feeling of their experience. He contrasts this discomfort with the line “Prospered through dreams of heat,” to describe his intimate past. The “dreams of heat,” having unfortunately caused the narrator to “Wake to their residue, / Sweat, and a clinging sheet.” Here the reader is lead to believe that the sexual past of the speaker has caused them to contract HIV and progress into suffering from AIDS. He utilizes the image his “flesh” as being a “shield,” that was resilient in that it “was gashed, it healed.” His unsafe sexual choices were “adored” at the time but led to him becoming sick and no longer living in a “body [he] could trust.” The skin metaphor is continued with the lines “The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked.” This is the narrator’s experience with realizing the illness he had contracted and now has a busy mind and a wrecked body. The second to last stanza return the reader to the speaker’s room where he is “Stopped upright / …Hugging my body to me / As if to shield it from / The pains that will go through me.” Here the use of shield has switched it’s meaning from his ruined body to his own caring for himself and attempt to prevent and soothe the “pains” that AIDS has caused him. The final line speaks of the man’s resignation to the larger-than-life issue at hand, stating “As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off.” The cold imagery returns in the word “avalanche.“ The first line shoes that his illness causes him to grow cold and the last claims AIDS’ entire existence is akin to a snowy natural disaster, something that kills, freezes over and is both naturally caused and possibly the fault of a certain human.