Thom Gunn’s Donahue’s Sister :: Donahues Sister

Thom Gunns Donahues babe Thom Gunn was a poet who often wrote of common hardships in every day life. Gunns writing style and choice of topics makes it obvious that he was writing in the middle to late twentieth century, and this is what draws people of today to his cipher. I moot that not only are people able to relate best to Gunn because of his topic selection but because of the time period the majority of his work is written in. In the twentieth century, particularly since the 1950s or so, we contain witnessed as a society the arrival of AIDS, an increasing amount of private parent families, an increase in drug and alcohol use among immature people, controversy over homosexuality, and an increasing number of instances where we, as a country, fool seen that money and power can get anyone off for any villainy or wrong-doing. In Donahues Sister, Gunn writes from a point of consider that more than half of our population can probably relate to because virtually all of us know some(prenominal)one with a drinking fuss or have one of our own. Donahues Sister shows the frustration of a brother as he explains the degree of severity that his sisters drinking problem has reached. The rime puts us in Donahues soundbox from the start so as if we are looking at her rest at the head of the stairs, drunk beyond recovery. Although there is surely way for different takeations, I believe Donahues Sister is written by Gunn primarily to show the destruction that addiction can do to a person or a relationship. In this paper, I will undertake to make Gunns voice heard according to how I interpret the poesy, and by doing so I hope to show how relevant this poem was to the decade it was written in, the 1980s. I also will explore some other possibilities of how this may have related to or affected Gunn directly. In other words, what factors may have been responsible for his writing this poem. The beginning of the poem describes the sister standing eye to eye wi th Donahue at the head of the stairs. She is in her own drunken human beings, which is referred to as her private world throughout the poem. This ikon is very accurate of a drunk who believes that they have everything under fudge and that the world they are in is actually better for them than the sober world reality.