With its clumsy technique and self-conscious desire to shock, "Lofty" is not an unqualified success. It is, none the less, very interesting, even disturbing: not least in the way its aggressive manner is belied by its less than macho psychology. It is here that we encounter the double identity. What is more, Lofty is haunted by a memory. As he tells the girl, You are not random picked. I tell you you Are much like one I knew before, that died . . . .

I never felt this restiveness with her:

I lay calm wanting nothing but what I had . . . .

. . . I couldn't if I would Be bed-content with likenesses so dumb.

Passed in the street they seem identical To her original, yet understood Exhaustively as soon as slept with, some Lack this, some that, and none like her at all.

Those who have written of the restlessness in most of these early poems have tended to suggest - not incorrectly - that the poet's dissatisfaction with his lovers (in "Carnal Knowledge", for instance) is due to an unacknowledged preference for men. But the "one . . . that died" in this poem is clearly a woman, and who is the woman no other can compete with if not the speaker's mother? It is not difficult to see how such recurrent disappointment can only have led Gunn to a different sort of love and sexuality: a love for the kind of person Charlotte Thomson might have mothered, pampered and adored: which is to say, young men like himself - or rather, like the inwardly tender young man, emotionally wounded, who was busy constructing another young man around himself, proof against the cruelties of life, as (to borrow two of his characteristic images) a warrior dons a suit of mail or a snail develops its shell. The bikers of "On the Move", for instance, armour themselves in such a way:

In goggles, donned impersonality, In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust, They strap in doubt - by hiding it, robust - And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

And it is armour of this kind that the mature Gunn learns to shed, as he does in "Touch" when he allows his cold, hard body to yield to his lover's warmth, or in "The Differences" (from The Man with Night Sweats, 1992):