A Sunset of the City

The poem’s speaker bears many similarities to the poet herself. Like the speaker, Brooks, at the time of writing the poem, was entering middle age in her mid-forties. Brooks’s son had entered adulthood and was serving in the US Marine Corps while her daughter was entering her teenage years, no longer a child. By creating a character who so closely shares her own experiences, Brooks suggests that these experiences of aging are, to a degree, common to women, even while the experience ultimately remains individual.

Brooks’s complex image of a home also reflects her lived experiences. Like her speaker, she lived in the city. As a result of the Great Migration, a mass movement of Black Americans who were looking for better lives in Northern cities, the demand in housing meant that apartments were turned into smaller kitchenettes, which were too small for a family to comfortably inhabit. Despite her experiences with poverty in her early married life, and regardless of the physical limitations, her marriage and family life were happy. The complex and contradictory realities of Brooks’s life likely informed the duality of the house symbolism in this poem.