When casually distinct we shared the most And lay upon a bed of clarity In luminous half-sleep where the will was lost.
The damaged street boys who turn up in The Passages of Joy (1982) and Boss Cupid, frail and in need of care, may reflect the vulnerable youth Gunn kept hidden within himself and beneath the rigorous armature of his poetry. It was probably such a man who shared Gunn's bed, drugs and company the night he died (April 25, 2004), and who, when the poet's heart gave way, disappeared into the San Francisco night: the kind of nemesis Gunn had dreamed for himself or seen foreshadowed in his earliest gay experiences:
I lie and live my body's fear something's at large and coming near . . .
Will he too do what that one did unlock me first open the lid
and reach inside with playful feel all the better thus to steal All this is perhaps to go deeper into psychobiography than seems appropriate to poems like Gunn's, with their deep respect for the world outside the self. Nevertheless, it ought perhaps to prompt another look at one of Gunn's central themes. No one will deny that the early books were affected by Existentialism. "On the Move" from The Sense of Movement (1957) is known to have been modelled on Jean-Paul Sartre's essay L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, and the conviction that humanity is something that we choose, which grows through My Sad Captains and Touch (1967), is affected by the later books of Albert Camus. There is no compulsion on us to be kind or brave or self-sacrificing: these are a matter of choice and preference, as they were for Claus von Stauffenberg when he "chose the unknown, and the bounded terror" in the face of a given evil. And the choice follows from an earlier one, which Sartre's essay outlines: the choice of identity. To accept an imposed identity is to suffer from mauvaise foi, bad faith. The bikers in "On the Move" choose their own course, though without a known objective:
One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it till, both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.
Such choices and sensations are characteristic of the early books. The soldier in "The Wound", if briefly, becomes the self he dreams of. In "Incident on a Journey", another dreamer wakes in the morning to find that "I was alive and felt my body sweet". Another biker, in "The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of his Death", rejoices, even if he is about to die, in "being what I please". Merlin in his cave perceives that "I must act, and make / The meaning in each movement that I take". The speaker of "Vox Humana", probably to be understood as Destiny, tells the poet that "sooner or later / you will have to name me" and that "you bring, / to what you define now, all / there is, ever, of future".
As Gunn develops, though, this insistence on self-definition becomes less visible and more complex. The extended sequence "Misanthropos", which dominates his fourth book Touch, draws together his thoughts on the human condition but adds something new to them. As the sequence nears its conclusion, the persona, who had thought he was the only survivor of a nuclear war, is surprised to discover a group of fellow humans, who:
