GUNN: I didn't find out till years later that when Shakespeare uses the word will it means the penis. I don't think we had adequately footnoted editions of the sonnets in those days, because I read through all the footnotes in my edition . . . .

INTERVIEWER: But do you think it's significant none the less?

GUNN: Yes, I do. So I was getting it unconsciously. But I don't think I found out until my thirties. I was astonished when I did!

Once these matters have been noticed, one's reading of the poems is subtly altered. The epigraph to the first section of My Sad Captains is from Troilus and Cressida: "The will is infinite and the execution confined, the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit". (To serve his purposes, Gunn slightly modified the lines.) Shakespeare's play is very much concerned with cleavages in human nature - between love and war, reason and will, honour and policy. In poem after poem in Gunn's first three books, the persona finds himself suspended between different aspects of self: between thought and feeling, action and reflection, body and intellect, will and energy. In "The Corridor", the title location is "A separate place between the thought and felt". In "The Wound", which opens the revised edition of Fighting Terms (1962), the speaker is a convalescent soldier whose wounded head can only begin to heal when he lies down. In an ill-considered revision of the poem for an American edition of the book, the soldier "did not move and dared not speak, / That reason might again be joined to will". In dream his identity stabilizes: "I was myself: subject to no man's breath". But it is also in dream that he becomes the sulking Achilles driven to rage by the death of Patroclus, his "masculine whore" (to borrow a phrase from Troilus), and when I thought, rage at his noble pain Flew to my head, and turning I could feel My wound break open wide.

The cleavage in the head is a cleavage in the self as well. It is striking how many of the earlier poems are concerned with divided selves and split identities. At the other end of Fighting Terms from "The Wound" is "Incident on a Journey", one of the poems indebted to Stevenson, the master of doppelganger - the speaker of the poem and the soldier he meets deriving from David Balfour and his complementary other, Alan Breck, in Stevenson's Kidnapped. There are also several poems explicitly concerned with doubles: "The Secret Sharer", "The Allegory of the Wolf Boy", "The Monster". The second of these, which concerns the "sad duplicity" of a boy who is by day "open and blond" and who by night turns into a werewolf, is an allegory of Gunn's homosexuality. "The Secret Sharer" takes its title from Conrad's story of a disciplined sea captain, who meets and hides his doppelganger, a fugitive murderer. Gunn's poem is concerned not with murder but with names:

Over the ankles in snow and numb past pain I stared up at my window three stories high:

From a white street unconcerned as a dead eye, I patiently called my name again and again.

The speaker's other self, who is "strange" to him, lives on in the warmth and comfort of his room: