Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

The line lands like a quiet betrayal of the social contract. Gunn starts from an ordinary, almost comforting fantasy of time: friends “growing old around me,” death arriving politely, “very gradually one by one.” The phrasing is procedural, even administrative, as if mortality were meant to keep an orderly calendar. That calm expectation isn’t naive so much as culturally inherited: the mid-century belief that modern life, medicine, and stability had made longevity the default setting.

Then the sentence turns, and the word “plague” does the heavy lifting. It’s an ancient term dragged into a contemporary city, collapsing progress into medieval panic. “Cut them off” is blunt, physical, almost cinematic; it refuses the soft euphemisms we reach for when death feels manageable. The emotional shock is embedded in the grammar: “And here was” makes the plague feel like an intruder suddenly standing in the room, not an abstract statistic.

Context matters: Gunn, a British poet living in San Francisco, wrote through the AIDS crisis as it tore through his community. The intent isn’t only to mourn but to register how AIDS rewired time itself. Youth, friendship, sex, and the future stop being separate categories; they become intertwined with triage and absence. Subtext: the cruelty isn’t just death, it’s premature death that steals the narrative arc we assume we get, the slow closing of a life. Gunn’s restraint is the point. He doesn’t perform grief; he shows how history interrupts private expectation and leaves you with a revised, harsher timeline.