A Sunset of the City

The poem opens with a name, a dramatis personae: Kathleen Eileen. Kathleen is the speaker of the poem. She shares some traits with Brooks herself; like Brooks, Kathleen is a middle-aged woman living in a city. The sing-song quality of her name suggests a youthful energy that contrasts with the poem’s more melancholic tone. Metrically, both “Kathleen” and “Eileen” are spondees, meaning that each word consists of two equally strong/stressed syllables; this meter, devoid of “weak” syllables, conveys a sense of power. Still, this prosodic vibrance takes on an ironic quality as the poem unfolds and the speaker voices her sense of fadedness and insignificance.

Even with its unadorned diction and economical syntax, the poem’s first line presents a paradoxical tension. “Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love” (Line 1). The speaker is both “already” and “no longer,” the paradox evokes a living death, and the adverb “already” suggests that this limbo has come sooner than expected. This element of limbo—of indeterminacy and displacement—underpins the rest of the poem’s narrative. Indeed, the second half of the first line presents a similar tension through a dichotomized experience: “lechery or love” (Line 1). The differentiation between the two ideas emphasizes their mutual exclusivity; there is no love in the lust, and no lust in the love; this implies that the speaker’s experience of men’s sexual desire has been that it is purely objectifying. Nevertheless, the speaker’s tone is one of subdued lamentation as she describes the loss of this objectifying attention.

While this split experience of sexuality prefaces a poem centering the idea of womanhood, these two contradictory gazes—of “lechery” (Line 1) and “love” (Line 1)—are, in part, unimportant, as they are “no longer” (Line 1) a part of her life. As an aging woman, the speaker exists outside this binary of relationship with others. She first describes the absence of the look of love. Her “daughters and sons have put [her] away with marbles and dolls” (Line 2), like she is a toy that no longer interests them as they have outgrown her. In addition, she is physically absent from their lives, as the children are “gone from the house” (Line 3). In the last two lines of the stanza, the speaker also addresses looks of lust, as both her “husband and lovers” are only “pleasant or somewhat polite” (Line 4) with her now. These absences have become simple facts in the same way that “night is night” (Line 5).

The statement that “night is night” (Line 5) also might describe the setting of the poem—or at least a metaphorical setting that the speaker anticipates. The poem’s title, “A Sunset of the City,” implies a time of day directly preceding night, just as the speaker, as she ages, anticipates death. The next stanza opens with a comment that suggests the speaker is physically outside as there “is a real chill out” (Line 6). This chill is also metaphorical, as the speaker envisions her aging as being in the autumn of her life as she approaches winter. Unlike the physiological temperature fluctuations due to menopause, this decline, or “real chill” (Line 6), is the “genuine thing” (Line 7). Even though she can see life continuing around her and youthful women continuing to live, the speaker is “not deceived” (Line 8) and does “not think it is still summer” (Line 8). The “sun” (Line 9) of life that allows “birds [to] continue to sing” (Line 9) is no longer for her.

The next stanza develops the speaker’s thoughts about aging as a type of seasonal change. She is sure that “[i]t is summer-gone” (Line 10). She then presents her rationale for this statement, saying that the “sweet flowers” (Line 11) are “indrying and dying down” (Line 11) and the “grasses [are] forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown” (Line 12). Flowers, often associated with romance and sexuality, emphasizes the speaker’s opening observation that she is no longer romantically or sexually desirable to others. The browning grasses suggest a physical decline in her body as a result of aging, while also recalling graying hair.

The chilly air brings the speaker back to a physical space before she again reflects on what the “fall crisp” (Line 13) means. With winter symbolizing old age and death, the speaker insists that she is “aware there is winter to heed” (Line 14). She emphasizes her awareness that she cannot escape death when she states that there “is no warm house / That is fitted with my need” (Lines 15-16). The image of a house also suggests that the speaker feels that she no longer belongs anywhere as no place can meet her needs; society is not concerned with aging women. While the speaker feels excluded, she is not expressing a desire for change, nor is she venting frustrations with societal expectations; she seems resigned to her life. Without the warmth of social inclusion, the speaker is no longer growing. In this now empty and “cold” (Line 17) house, the “washed echoes” (Line 18) of her earlier life are now “tremulous” as they move down the “lost halls” (Line 18) that represent paths the speaker did not take in life. She simply states, “I am a woman” (Lines 19, 20) as an explanation for these events. Since she is “dusty” (Line 19) as she stands “among new affairs” (Line 19), the speaker suggests that she no longer actively participates in these events. Now, instead of being an active participant, she is “a woman who hurries through her prayers” (Line 20) so that she can attain spiritual absolution before she dies.

The “[t]in intimations” (Line 21) of her earlier life are both paradoxically a “[d]esert” (Line 22) and her “dear relief” (Line 22). A desert is devoid of lush plants, which suggests the lack of growth that the speaker has been describing—but she also calls it her “dear relief” (Line 22), suggesting that being out of society’s gaze and no longer being the object of male desire might also have its benefits. This experience thus might be a place of refuge as an “islanding from grief” (Line 23). The speaker is safe from desire and can reflect upon the end of her life as she holds a “small communion with the master shore” (Line 24); the line extends the metaphor of the “island” in Line 23. She “incline[s] this ear” (Line 25) to the “Twang” (Line 25) of the “[t]in intimations” (Line 21). In doing so, she can consider the “dual dilemma” (Line 26) that she faces: to continue to wither and “dry” (Line 26) as an aging woman, or to control her own fate by dying—taking a “leap” (Line 27) to her death.

The poem ends with a highly ambiguous single-line stanza where the speaker asks the question “Somebody muffed it?” (Line 28), then concludes, “Somebody wanted to joke” (Line 28). The question suggests that the speaker is responding to an outside cue: Somebody has bungled something—maybe their own “leap” (Line 27) (implicitly a suicide), or maybe their own life. Perhaps life itself—or whatever providence deals humans their individual fates—has “muffed” what should have been a more fulfilling story for the speaker, who now feels she is a joke. Whatever its interpretation, the line’s distinct oddness—as an indeterminate and seemingly non sequitur punctuation that stands isolated, constituting its own stanza—caps the poem with a sense of bleakness. The words “muffed” (Line 28) and “joke” (Line 28) convey futility.