[Thom Gunn is an American-involved British poet] who has for a number of years taught at the University of California in Berkeley. In his first book, The Sense of Movement (1957), Gunn showed a fascinated interest in the world of the tough, leather-jacketed young motorcyclists and their slightly sinister, apparently pointless activity:

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.

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.

Exact conclusion of their hardiness
Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts
They ride, direction where the tires press."…

Where [the British poet Charles Tomlinson] is concerned with the precise ambience and impact of a given scene or personality, and with its proper idiom (rhythmically as well as in phrasing), and relates these concerns to his passion for the integrity of cultural heritage and of natural materials, Gunn turns his similar talents in other directions. He is attracted to the life of action, as a theme and as a way of meeting the world. And beyond that, as in the poem 'On the Move' just quoted, whose epigraph is 'Man, you gotta Go,' he is something of a 'metaphysical' poet. 'On the Move' begins by observing that there is 'hidden purpose' in the sudden movements of birds—'the blue jay scuffling in the bushes,' a 'gust of birds' that 'spurts across the field,' 'the wheeling swallows.' We can discover their meaning, but to gain 'their instinct, or their poise, or both' in human affairs is to move 'with an uncertain violence,' under 'dust thrown by a baffled sense,' amid 'the dull thunder of approximate words.' Then come the motorcyclists of the quoted passage, as if to embody the abstract thought behind these images. After the closeup of 'The Boys,' Gunn devotes the second half of his poem to contemplation of the human significance of their kind of concentrated action:

It is a part solution, after all.
One is not necessarily discord
On earth; or damned because, half animal,
One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes
Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.
One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward."…

'On the Move' is the opening poem of The Sense of Movement. It is followed by an allegorical poem, 'The Nature of an Action,' which turns the issue of 'movement' inward much as Herbert does with the issue of free will in 'The Collar.' The speaker describes his passage from the habits of passivity and introspection under the domination of the overwhelming power of tradition to a more active state, 'directed by the compass of my heart.' Painfully he moves through a short, narrow corridor, from the room of the past to the room of the future. The passage takes twenty years, full of doubt about his existence or the existence of anything else, until he finds the proper 'handle in the mind'—his will—to open the second door. The furnishings inside are the same as in the first; the only difference lies in the changed character of his presence among the room's

… heavy-footed chairs,
A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears,

A polished table, holding down the look
Of bracket, mantelpiece, and marbled book."…

A youthful preciosity and intellectual self-consciousness marks the greater number of Gunn's poems in this early book. The two opening poems break into the clear, however, as do a few others. 'Human Condition' is another metaphysical contemplation, this time on the imprisoned state of that 'pinpoint of consciousness,' the individual self. 'The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of His Death' is a vivid 'vision' indeed, of the risk of 'being what I please.' It is an assertion, as well, that even the very concretely imagined death of the symbolic motorcyclists (sinking into marshland out of a stubborn refusal to yield to circumstances) is merely a confrontation of volitionless nature by man's invincible will. 'Lines for a Book' is written in Audenesque, half-ironic praise of the 'toughs' of history as opposed to the men of mere sensibility ('I praise the overdogs from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender'). 'Market at Turk,' a sympathetic close-up of a hoodlumish San Franciscan, celebrates the young ruffian's poised readiness—purposeless yet oriented toward some undefined and dangerous violence. 'In Praise of Cities' is a 'love song' on the changeableness, the surprises, the tantalizing promise and hardness of the great cities in the image of an infinitely varied woman. Amid the echoes of Yeats, Auden, Crane, and other masters, these poems show signs of a power of concentration and of an ability brutally to suppress self-indulgence and sentimentality, in the interest of testing forbidden sympathies and of pursuing realities outside the over-protected and over-civilized private self.

To a certain degree the promise was fulfilled in Gunn's second book, My Sad Captains (1961), but really in only two poems, 'In Santa Maria del Popolo' and the title poem. The former is Gunn's most successful poem, in combined sublety, power, and intricate yet subdued patterning. The poem contemplates a painting by Caravaggio 'on one wall of this recess.' It is a painting of Saul fallen from his horse and 'becoming Paul,' and one must wait until evening when the sun becomes 'conveniently oblique' to see it fully. At first, while waiting,

I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.

Then the whole scene emerges—'the act, beneath the horse,' of transformation, with an 'indifferent groom' present and Saul sprawling, 'foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,' among a 'cacophony of dusty forms' and making a mysterious 'wide gesture of the lifting arms' during his convulsive fit. Content with the external details, the possibly symbolic gesture, the sense of 'candor and secrecy inside the skin' that he was able to convey, the painter leaves the scene a mystery. Gunn remembers other paintings of Caravaggio's—the hard city types in them—and the artist's murder ('for money, by one such picked off the streets'). Turning, 'hardly enlightened,' from the chapel to the church's dim interior, he sees the people praying:

Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
—For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

So Gunn in this poem closes in on a multiple and sympathetic view of the human condition. He discovers his driving motif in the movement from the darkness within the painting to the darkness of meanings revealed by the painting itself when it comes into full view, and then to the vulnerability of the worshipers in their dark setting and in the poor comfort of their prayers and their phys ical attitudes; and so the final pair of lines, abstract as they are, becomes the largest statement of what the human gesture in the face of 'nothingness' creates or means. The poem 'My Sad Captains' reaches through to a comparable insight, but in quite different terms. The 'sad captains' are a few friends and a few historical figures who have come to be spiritual models to the poet:

… They were men
who, thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion."…

But now

they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

Gunn's preoccupation with existential emptiness on the one hand, and with the assertion of meaning through sheer will or willful action on the other, brings him in 'My Sad Captains' to the same essential confrontation as does 'In Santa Maria del Popolo,' but without the merciful buffer of anything like the Caravaggio painting. The 'message,' in the spirit perhaps of Williams's Έ1 Hombre,' is a desolate courage that stakes everything on pure energy. As in the earlier volume, the poems that stand out—in particular, these two—are so sharply differentiated from the rest that the latter for the most part seem mere exercises by comparison. At any rate, the lesser pieces are on 'set' themes—the difficulty of reaching past lust to love, the 'compact innocence, child-like and clear,' that made the Nazi stormtrooper the peculiarly unshakable monster he was, the fate of a middle-aged rake, and so on. Derivative notes, especially from Auden but also at times from Edwin Muir and others, constantly interfere with Gunn's own voice in poems like 'The Byrnies' and 'Modes of Pleasure' that are otherwise imaginative and psychologically stirring.