Horns bud bright in my hair.

My feet are turning hoof.

And Father, see my face - Skin that was damp and fair Is barklike and, feel, rough.

These images stand, we soon realize, for the transformations of puberty: from the feminine softness of childhood to the roughness and hardness of adult masculinity - that "insensitivity" that Gunn finds so attractive and which does not seem, in the end, exclusive of tenderness. The news of these changes is first communicated - naturally enough - to someone called "Father", who then becomes "Greytop" and finally "Old Man". As the appellations change, the tone gets more threatening:

I rear, break loose, I neigh Snuffing the air, and harden Toward a completion, mine.

It is not only that the speaker, like Hermes and Midday Mick, has "the down just showing on his face", but that he is becoming independent, troublesome, full of surplus energy. He is, as we say, becoming himself, and the change involves an attack on the "Old Man", who anticipates it in his "groin's trembling". What is more, oedipal rejection of the father involves - as seems to have been the case in Gunn's own life - closer communication with the mother:

I stamp upon the earth A message to my mother.

And then I lower my horns.

If that is first of all a message to Mother Earth, it also invokes the buried woman who governed the poet's life. Still more importantly, perhaps, she is the poet's Muse. To her he sends messages, which is to say poetry, the whole assertively masculine enterprise in thrall to this mighty but absent female, who is both his inspiration and the death waiting to embrace him.

All poets need a Muse, not only as inspiration but as an audience of one: the person the poet imagines himself addressing. The Muse being female, the relationship is usually thought of as erotic. For gay poets, as for women, it therefore presents a problem. It clearly did for Gunn as a young man, but by 1974 he had reached a resolution. "I used to believe my muse was male; but I've come to realize that (Robert) Graves is right, that the muse has to be female. The Goddess is a mother, not a wife or a lover. The feminine principle is the source and I think it dominates in male artists whether homo- or heterosexual."

Once he had come out, in the 1970s, Gunn fully conceded that he was a mother's boy. As everyone agrees, his poetry, especially the early work, is deeply indebted to Shakespeare, whose complex sexuality has been endlessly, not to say tediously, discussed. The poem "A Plan of Self-Subjection", in what might now be seen as elaborated code, declares Gunn's wish to emulate, among others, "Coriolanus, whom I most admire". It is a very odd choice of hero: for most readers, I would guess, not even a sympathetic one. The most fiercely and insensitively macho of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists, Caius Martius Coriolanus turns out to have a weakness: a devotion to his mother exceeding love of wife or son or native land. When Coriolanus, yielding to the tears of his mother Volumnia, spares Rome, his ally and erstwhile enemy Tullus Aufidius turns on him in fury:

Ay, Martius, Caius Martius! Dost thou think I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name Coriolanus, in Corioles?

You lords and heads o' th' state, perfidiously He has betray'd your business, and given up, For certain drops of salt, your city Rome . . .

Reaching (one supposes) for his sword, Coriolanus calls on the god of war: "Hear'st thou, Mars?". And Aufidius responds, "Name not the god, thou boy of tears!". "Coriolanus" is the hero's adopted name; "Martius", which has Mars at the root of it, is the name he has inherited from his father. In what sense are he and his names one? These verbal integuments conceal the "boy of tears", whose fundamental loyalty, like Gunn's, was (in Volumnia's words) to his "mother's womb / That brought thee to this world". Thom Gunn was not much given to conventional pieties, but his mother's name was something he held sacred, adopted for himself and served in his life and writing to the end.