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The Missing | Introduction

Completed in 1997, Thom Gunn’s “The Missing” takes its place among the most eloquent and poignant testaments to have arisen from the literature of AIDS. Part elegy, part rueful meditation, the poem is told from the perspective of the survivor, one who has been left behind in the wake of a string of senseless deaths. Here, the speaker faces an uncertain and sorely compromised future stripped of the loving support of the friends on whom he has come to rely so heavily. And yet, more than a confrontation of the mystery and irrationality of death, the poem explores the extent to which society influences and shapes the individual. It celebrates the meaningful connections and lasting ties that punctuate a life and often outlive it in the realm of memory.

“The Missing” first appeared in Gunn’s 1992 collection, The Man with Night Sweats. As its title declares, the AIDS crisis is one of its central preoccupations. Night sweats are one of the symptoms of AIDS and often come as a harrowing harbinger of a yet undiagnosed disease that has already taken up residence in the body. Clearly, this grim and visceral detail indicates a book that is honest in its unsentimental portraits of lives cut short and of people languishing in their prime.

In addition, the poem displays another hallmark of Gunn’s poetry: a complex and seamlessly rendered formal structure. Written in iambic pentameter and adopting an abab rhyme scheme, “The Missing” is a unique example of a traditional, formal poem taking a contemporary theme as its subject. “Rhythmic form and subject-matter are locked in a permanent embrace,” Gunn writes in an essay expressing his theories of poetics, and the embrace is an image that recurs throughout Gunn’s work and figures centrally in “The Missing.” It is an image of both friendship and desire, two sources of empowerment and identity. But it is also an image with the dark shadow of death looming over it, suggesting the infection, the tragedy to which desire can lead.

The Missing Summary

Lines 1-4: From the onset, the speaker is established as an observer, watching the spread of an unnamed “plague”—the AIDS epidemic. As the speaker helplessly witnesses, his friends wilt and expire. Their bodies, unable to resist the spread of the disease, “grow thin.” They become foreign and altered as they succumb to the virus, vulnerable, or as the speaker puts it, “bared.” This slow yet sudden expiration prompts the speaker to examine his own state. Is health something the speaker can still rely on without question? Will he be able to avoid this dissipation, in which the body grows more and more “vague”? Though his “shape” can be “sculpted,” though the body can be built up and strengthened, ultimately there is no real cure for chronic diseases like AIDS.

Lines 5-8: While steeling the body’s exterior, growing tougher in the face of tragedy may seem like a logical strategy, it is a response the speaker ultimately rejects. “I do not like the statue’s chill contour” he asserts, as it is equated with an emotional coldness, an indifference to or denial of the terrible reality of the epidemic. Self-defense or self-protection could result in a dangerous isolation at a time when the action and togetherness of community are needed. It is a mode of response the speaker feels is no longer appropriate, “not nowadays.” What is needed instead is the unification of all the body’s reserves, combining the intellect, physical strength, and emotion (“mind, limb, feeling”) into a greater and more powerful whole. Only then can this strength be projected outward in a vital connection with others. In the stanza’s final line, the speaker effectively employs the literary device alliteration, or the repetition of initial sounds. “In” is echoed in “involved,” which once again repeats its sound with “increasing.” Here the poet has found a way to match form and content. The specific choice of words and sounds mirrors and validates the poem’s argument, the specific point it is trying to establish. Thus, the connection formed in the repetition of sounds is an aural way of demonstrating the connectedness of the speaker’s evergrowing “family.”

Lines 9-12: In this sharply observed and delicately phrased stanza, Gunn injects a dark irony into the poem. The onslaught of the disease has spurred a mobilization, as friends, both the stricken and the concerned, unite for support and action. First described in the second stanza, the third extends and deepens the portrayal of this process of coming together. In the face of the grim realities of the epidemic, fellowship and community have prevailed, spreading from “friend … to … friend.” These close bonds grow and replicate, moving from a “supple entwinement” to “an unlimited embrace.” And yet upon closer examination the bonds are the source of something far more insidious. Gunn’s words are... » Complete The Missing Summary