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

Thom Gunns Donahues Sister Thom Gunn was a poet who often wrote of common hardships in every day life. Gunns piece of writing style and choice of topics makes it obvious that he was writing in the middle to late 20th century, and this is what draws people of today to his work. I believe that not totally are people able to appertain 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 1950s 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 away for any crime or wrong-doing. In Donahues 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 s omeone with a drinking problem 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 poem puts us in Donahues body from the lettuce so as if we are looking at her standing at the enquiry of the stairs, drunk beyond recovery. Although there is surely room for different interpretations, 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 attempt to make Gunns voice heard according to how I interpret the poem, and by doing so I confide 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 Donahu e 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 authority and that the world they are in is actually better for them than the sober world reality.