Collected Poems by Thom Gunn (1994)
- These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.
- Moly (l. 9-10)
- Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
- Moly (l. 21-22)
- Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one
The great grey rigid uniform combined
Safety with virtue of the sun.
Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
- Considering the Snail (l. 5-10)
- 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 (l. 30-32)
- Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs
He turns revolt into a style, prolongs
The impulse to a habit of the time.
- "Elvis Presley,", in The Sense of Movement (1957).
- My thoughts are crowded with death
and it draws so oddly on the sexual
that I am confused
confused to be attracted
by, in effect, my own annihilation.
- "In Time Of Plague," in The Man With Night Sweats (1992)