Poetry Key Themes

The City Planners

Critiques the uniformity of modern suburbs

• Order and Cleanliness

• Destruction

• Ignorance from The City Planners

The Planners

Critiques economic development destroying the unique and historical values of a city

• Perfectionism

• Artificial

• Manipulation/ Control

The Man with Night Sweats

Explores themes of fear and loss in the face of illness, particularly AIDS as Gunn lost many friends to AIDS during the crisis in the 80s

• Images of Opposites in Dream State and Waking Reality

• Adventure and Heroism

• Realistic Vision for the Future

Night Sweat

Explores the affects of writer’s block

• Water References

• Death/Deterioration

• Light as the wife

Rain

Depicts the experience of a man waiting to go to war

• Melancholy/Sadness

• Death/Mortality

• Cleansing/Rebirth

The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument

Depicts a mother admiring her baby and explores how human emotions could not make something so perfect

• The Imperfection of the Spirit

• The Miracle of Human Biology

• The Connection Between Mind and Body

Long Distance

The speaker depicts his father’s experience with grief due to the loss of the speaker’s mother and then his own as his father is portrayed to be dead at the end of the poem

• The persistence of Grief

• Love and Denial

• Differences in Coping with Grief

Funeral Blues

Explores different ways of grieving and the impact that losing someone can have on a person

• Different ways of Grieving

• The Author’s Isolation

• Love and Connection to the Person

Request to a Year

Explores the various limitations placed on women as well as the role of the artist in recording events and bearing witness.

• The idea of it being a Legendary/Heroic Story

• Juxtaposition of the grandmother’s calmness and the limitations of women

• The power of art

On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book

The speaker uses the experience of finding a small fly crushed in a book as a metaphor for the inevitability and abruptness of our own death

• Saintly Imagery

• Fly’s death related to our fate

• Death as powerful and inevitable

A Consumer’s Report

The speaker completes a consumer’s report on the product that is life and uses the metaphor of life as a product to explore its limitations and its meaning

• Extended metaphor of life as a product that evokes satire

• Detached, disillusioned tone: reflecting lack of fulfilment

• Confusion and Contradiction: Life as unclear and overwhelming

He Never Expected Much

The writer had a troubled relationship with his wife and communicates his feelings of regret for the way he treated her and the way he lived his life through this poem after her death

• Theme of pessimism

• Addressing the World as a being/parental/advisory figure

• Contrast between childhood and adulthood

The Telephone Call

The poem is a humorous dialogue that can be read as a more serious reflection on our hopes versus the disappointments of life. The speaker receives a phone call stating they have won a prize but then it turns out the prize is the call itself.

• Patronising identity of the caller

• Use of hyperbolic language to create a sense of false hope vs reality

• Development of the person’s emotions throughout the poem

Away, Melancholy

A reflection on the way humans relate to the rest of nature, how we construct ideas of God and concludes by affirming the essential goodness of humanity, even in the face of suffering. The speaker of the poem rejects and banishes melancholy rather than embracing it as a creative force.

• Description of nature in the best light

• Depiction of humanities worst contrasting with hope

• Form and Structure

Ozymandias

Explores the impermanence and insignificance of power through the discovery of a statue depicting a once powerful leader of a once powerful empire

• Description of the Shattered Statue implying Impermanence of power

• Description of the Desert implying the empire’s insignificance

• The Sculpture