The Poetry Shelf 4 - 'The Hug'

Thom Gunn

I’m cheating this week – for Valentine’s Day I’ve scooted ahead through my shelves to find this beautiful love poem by Thom Gunn.

It’s one of my favourite poems ever, describing a moment of intimate connection in a long relationship, a moment which floats free of time in the poet’s drowsiness.

When I first read it at university I was not yet 22, but I knew that I wanted this kind of relationship one day, and more than 30 years later I find it just as romantic. Gunn goes to bed after an enjoyable evening with his partner and an old friend. ‘My sleep broke on a hug’, Gunn tells us when his partner joins him, suggesting the wave-like sensation of dozing. The hug is described in vivid, tactile terms, the delicate rhyming pattern through the poem creates the comforting feeling of a lullaby, and the ending is a quiet celebration of the security and ‘stay’ of mutual commitment.

When I re-read Gunn’s poem this week, I couldn’t help thinking of Queen Elizabeth II’s description of Prince Philip as her ‘strength and stay’.¹ It turns out that the Queen borrowed the phrase from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667.² Gunn has described how his mother shared classic literature with him when he was a child, including the work of Milton. I looked up the etymology of stay and discovered that the Old English stæg meant ‘a strong rope used to steady or support something,’³ often used in a nautical context. And this word, at the end of Gunn’s poem, returns to and answers those disorienting waves of sleep earlier on.

I met a lot of poets when I was working on the Southbank Centre’s literature events programme in the early 2000s, but I never got to meet Thom Gunn or hear him read, which I was sad about when he died in 2004. ‘The Hug’ is the first poem in his collection The Man with Night Sweats, which was published in 1992 and chronicles the impact of the AIDS epidemic in California in the 80s, during which Gunn lost many friends. It’s interesting that Gunn chose to place a poem about his decades-long relationship with his partner Michael Kitay at the beginning of the book, published during a very different time for LGBTQ+ people. (Let’s not forget that back in Britain, Section 28, which prohibited ‘promoting homosexuality’, wasn’t repealed until 2003.) The Man with Night Sweats is a brilliant, moving collection and the last in Gunn’s Collected Poems, although he published further books after this.

Here’s to all the loving relationships in our lives, which steady and support us.

1. From her golden wedding anniversary speech in 1997.

2. According to research carried out by the University of Exeter.

3. From www.merriamwebster.com. I didn’t know it when I chose the poem for this week, but there’s a linguistic as well as thematic link in this word to next week’s newsletter...