16 pages • 32 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksA Sunset of the City
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Effects of Aging
The poem’s primary thematic concern is the effects of aging—specifically, aging as a woman. The first two lines describe the three societally expected roles of women: mother, wife, and sex object. However, this woman is “[a]lready […] no longer looked at” (Line 1). As she ages, the woman disappears from sight. She’s even “put [...] away” (Line 2) like the childhood toys of her grown children. Her “husband and lovers” (Line 4) are only “pleasant or somewhat polite” (Line 4)—in other words, not passionate—now that she is no longer young.
Once these prescribed roles disappear for a woman as she ages, society leaves her no clear purpose; these roles are limited to the youthful. The rest of the poem focuses only on the absences in the speaker’s life. She is “summer-gone” (Line 10), without a “warm house / That is fitted with [her] need” (Lines 15-16), and “dusty” (Line 19) from no longer moving. Her new life is now nothing but “echoes” (Line 18) and “intimations” (Line 21). The speaker feels that her life is empty now.
Still, the speaker is not completely bitter about aging, as it does provide “dear relief” (Line 22) from societal expectations and the male gaze. While aging does make her life a “[d]esert” (Line 22), it also gives her a moment of peace. This paradox results in a “dual dilemma” (Line 26). Aging results in a loss of control that makes the speaker ask whether she should continue aging and “dry[ing] / In humming pallor” or whether she should “leap and die” (Line 27). This question is left unresolved, as the speaker remarks that an unspecified “[s]omebody muffed it” (Line 28) and “wanted to joke” (Line 28).
The Duality of Life
The dualities of life are a recurring theme throughout the poem: young and old, warm and cold, presence and absence, past and future, and life and death. The connection between youth and warmth versus aged and cold reflects the change in the quality of her life. Not only is her life now filled with absences, but she herself is absent from society. The speaker is looking back at the past to contrast it with her future. This dual perspective emphasizes the strict binaries that the speaker feels society demands of her—demands that result in the speaker herself thinking in binaries, leading to a “dual dilemma” (Line 26). The speaker presents two possible courses of action: continue to live, or die. However, the speaker complicates this binary. The life of an aging woman is equated with dying and inactivity; she can either “dry / In humming pallor” (Lines 26-27) or embrace death, an active choice “to leap and die” (Line 27). The speaker, so far accepting of the changes due to age, here seeks to reimagine her future by taking control of her fate, even if the choice is morbid.
Meaning and Control in Life
The speaker considers what gives meaning to her life and how to give a new purpose to her life as she leaves behind her youth. In the first half of the poem, the speaker is most concerned with the absence of meaning in her life; her previous roles as mother, wife, and lover are no longer options for fulfillment. This new loss emphasizes the speaker’s passivity in her life. While she is not critical of her past and does not sound bitter, she seeks more agency in the second half of the poem. Still, the only options she can think of are bleak, as she can continue the disempowering experience of aging or she can die by suicide. The intersections of her gender and class (and likely her race) all limit her ability to control her life, and her agency is slowly disappearing.
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