Tag Archives: The Man With Night Sweats

The poem is a dramatic monologue in which the abject solitary persona wakes up at night paranoid about the implications of the night sweats (early symptom of AIDS) while suggesting a melancholic desire to forestall the inevitable. Gunn said that “the poem is spoken by somebody who wakes up sweating and assumes that he has AIDS. I was lucky enough not to be HIV positive, but in those early years, when it seemed so mysterious, and so especially nightmarish, and when people that I knew were dying, or had already died … If you sweat during the night, maybe you have flu, or maybe you just have too many blankets on, but you think: “Oh my god, this is night sweats, ” the night sweats that precede AIDS. ‘