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

Thom Gunns Donahues infant 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 browse. I suppose that not only are people able to relate die 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 draw witnessed as a society the arrival of AIDS, an increasing amount of unity parent families, an increase in drug and alcohol use among unexampled people, controversy over homosexuality, and an increasing number of instances where we, as a country, have seen that money and power can get anyone off for any hatred or wrong-doing. In Donahues Sister, Gunn writes from a point of behold that more than half of our population can probably relate to because several(prenominal) all of us know someone with a drinking line of work 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 song puts us in Donahues tree trunk 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 style for different visualizeations, 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 seek to make Gunns voice heard according to how I interpret the verse, 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 with Donahue at the head of the stairs. She is in her own drunken introduction, which is referred to as her private world throughout the poem. This line drawing is very accurate of a drunk who believes that they have everything under see to it and that the world they are in is actually better for them than the sober world reality.