Thom Gunn’s Donahue’s Sister
Thom Gunn was a poet who often wrote of common hardships in every day life. Gunn’s 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 work. I believe that not only are people able to relate better 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 1950’s or so, we have witnessed as a society; the arrival of AIDS, an increasing amount of single parent families, an increase in drug and alcohol use among young 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 crime or wrong-doing. In “Donahue’s Sister”, Gunn writes from a point of view that more than half of our population can probably relate to because almost all of us know someone with a drinking problem or have one of our own. “Donahue’s Sister” shows the frustration of a brother as he explains the degree of severity that his sister’s drinking problem has reached. The poem puts us in Donahue’s body from the start so as if we are looking at her standing at the head of the stairs, drunk beyond recovery. Although there is surely room for different interpretations, I believe “Donahue’s 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 attempt to make Gunn’s voice heard according to how I interpret the poem, and by doing so I hope to show how relevant this poem was to the decade it was written in, the 1980’s. 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 world, which is referred to as her “private world” throughout the poem. This depiction is very accurate of a drunk who believes that they have everything under control and that the world they are in is actually better for them than the sober world; reality.
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