turn and look at me full, and as they pass they name me.

What is the name Adam speaks after the schedule of beasts?

The section ends with the speaker addressing one of the new arrivals and "naming him, also, by name". (When "Misanthropos" was first published in Encounter in August, 1965, this line read "naming him, also, my name". Whether this was a typographical error or Gunn's original thought I cannot tell; if the latter, it makes my point still more emphatically.) The last man becomes the first man, in effect, but with a difference. Adam had named the beasts, but his own name - the Hebrew for "man" - was a given name. Here, the speaker acknowledges common humanity by voluntarily accepting the name and using it himself. This choice of a shared identity is Gunn's liberation from what he had thought of as the "Human Condition": "condemned to be / An individual". In this new world - and I suspect the imagined place where the poem ends is partly the country Gunn had adopted - humanity is a choice, as it is for Dr Rieux in Camus's La Peste, evidenced as much in the act of choosing as in the choice of virtue. For the ordinary unschooled reader of "Misanthropos", these matters are not connected with Gunn's identity, but they must have been informed by the experience of choosing his own name.

As these reflections suggest, the poet of My Sad Captains and Touch is rather less focused on self than he was in the previous books. He returns to the problem of identity in Moly (1970), but the terms of the argument are now rather different from Sartre's. In the late 1960s, like many others at that time, Gunn experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. "Moly" alludes to a passage in the Odyssey. Odysseus' sailors have been turned into pigs by Circe. En route to her house, the hero is met by Hermes, who offers him a herb called moly to protect him from her sorcery. The herb is clearly a trope for LSD, and in the title poem, one of Circe's pigs is searching for it to recover his lost humanity: once again, human identity is not a given but something we go in quest of. "Street Song" from the same collection is the spiel of a drug dealer who calls himself Midday Mick. "Too young to grow a beard", he reminds the reader of Hermes in the book's Homeric epigraph: "in the likeness of a young man, the down just showing on his face". Like Hermes, too, he has visited other worlds:

Call it heaven, call it hell, Join me and see the world I sell.

Join me, and I will take you there, Your head will cut out from your hair Into whichever self you choose.

What he offers his customers is not so much "Keys lids acid and speed" - though they are what he actually sells - as something immaterial: the ability to become what you choose to be.

Change is the subject of Moly, and the book begins with a striking instance of Ovidian metamorphosis. The speaker of "Rites of Passage" is transformed into an animal - not a pig this time, but a horned beast:

Something is taking place.