[Thom Gunn's work] has reached something of a culmination and turning point in Jack Straw's Castle…. (p. 108)

The nature of Gunn's development can be glimpsed in three 'mirror' poems. The persona of "The Corridor" (1957) peeps through a keyhole at an act of love. He masters his ambivalent reaction by willing not to participate in such pleasure in order not "to be mastered" or become "the inhabitant/Of someone else's world, a mere shred to fit." But when he discovers he is being watched in a distant glass his self-denial of pleasure to preserve a fictional privacy becomes pointless. Yet, though Gunn's persona is prepared to meet the watcher as a friend, it's clear this compromising 'other' is a stranger.

"The Messenger" (1971) intensifies the ambivalent pulls. A man stares "At one red flower he dares not know," though he tries to echo and become it like a mirror and...