A Sunset of the City

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is one of the most highly regarded American poets of the 21st century. Brooks won many awards and was the first Black American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her poem “A Sunset of the City” was published as a part of her fourth poetry collection, The Bean Eaters, in 1960. The widely praised collection includes some of her most notable poems and explores the racial and economic tensions of Chicago’s Bronzeville. While “A Sunset of the City” is among Brooks’s lesser known poems, critics often consider it an early example of her interrogations of race, gender, and class—themes that also characterize her more mature works.

This lyric poem’s speaker expresses her concerns about aging as a woman. More indebted to poetic tradition than her later works that were informed by her connections to the Black Arts Movement, the poem is more conventional in its use of language, images, and punctuation.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, but, as a part of the Great Migration—a historical migration of millions of African Americans out of the Southern US—her family moved to the South Side of Chicago when she was six weeks old, and Brooks lived in Chicago for the rest of her life. Her father was a janitor, and her mother was a schoolteacher and a concert pianist. Brooks was the oldest of two children.

She began her writing career at an early age, encouraged by her mother. Her first poem was published when she was 13. By 16, she had published 75 poems, and by her high school graduation in 1935, Brooks was a regular contributor to the prominent Black periodical, The Chicago Defender. As a result of her experiences with both integrated and all-Black high schools, Brooks had a keen understanding of racial injustice and prejudice, and this hard-won insight informed her writing. She received commendations and encouragement from other Black writers like James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes.

As Brooks knew she wanted to be a writer, she thought a four-year college degree was unnecessary, and she graduated in 1936 with a two-year degree from Wilson Junior College. In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. They had two children, a son and a daughter.

After college, Brooks’s literary acclaim grew rapidly. In 1941, she started participating in poetry workshops, and in 1945 she published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville—an immediate critical success. The next year, she received her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1949) earned her the 1950 Pulitzer Prize; Brooks was the first Black author to achieve that honor. She then published her first and only prose book, Maud Martha (1953). One of her most famous works, In the Mecca (1968), was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry. That same year, she started serving as the poet laureate for the State of Illinois, a position she held until her death (December 3, 2000, aged 83). Her autobiographical books, Report From Part One and Report From Part Two, were published in 1972 and 1975, respectively. In 1985 and 1986, Brooks was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress; in characteristic trailblazer fashion, she was the first Black woman to hold this position.

Brooks also loved teaching. While her son served in the US Marine Corps from 1961 to 1964, Brooks mentored her son’s fiancée in poetry writing. She gained more experience with mentoring after attending the Second Black Writers’ Conference in Nashville in 1967, where she was introduced to Black nationalism; she also began her association with the Black Arts Movement and its artists like Amiri Baraka. This experience informed both her poetry and Brooks’s future mentoring and teaching—something she enjoyed so much that she began to more frequently mentor other young Black poets. She ultimately taught extensively in her lifetime. She had her first formal teaching experience at the University of Chicago before also teaching and holding posts at Columbia College Chicago, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, and the City College of New York, amongst others.

Poem Text

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “A Sunset of the City.” 1963. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker of “A Sunset of the City” is a middle-aged woman reflecting on her position in society and the outlook for her life. The tone is melancholic, as the speaker feels that she is no longer desirable: Men are no longer sexually attracted to her, and her children have outgrown her. She is aware of this decline in others’ regard.

This experience, she knows, is real. She knows she is past her youth and is now entering the later stages of life. She perceives how her body and life are decaying in the way nature does in the fall and winter. She considers whether life under these circumstances—the life of a middle-aged woman—is worth living.

The speaker’s final line is ambiguous: “Somebody wanted to joke” (Line 28); the “[s]omebody” (Line 28) of the line is unclear, as is the “joke.” Did another person mess up their life (“[muff] it”)? Did life itself fail women? Regardless, by following her question up with the enigmatic statement that “[s]omebody wanted to joke” (Line 28), she suggests that the subject of her thoughts is not taken seriously.