Wesley Curtwright’s “The Close of Day” is a compact meditation on the way memory and mortality keep life only partly visible. The poem gathers three adjacent scenes—a photograph album, a picture gallery, and the sun moving across the sky—to suggest that human beings are always both spectators and the ones being hurried along. Its central idea is not simply that life ends; it is that we experience even the life we have only in fragments, under pressure, until the final darkness overtakes us.
The poem’s shape reinforces that pressure. Fourteen iambic pentameter lines move with a steady, almost processional step, but the rhyme is not mechanically neat: an envelope rhyme encloses the first quatrain, while later lines pair by looser echoes before the decisive couplet. That slight irregularity fits a poem about incomplete perception. The syntax also stretches across line breaks, as in the opening sentence: the quoted fragment “To meet and then to part,” the turned album leaves, and the recalled faces do not complete the thought until the fourth line’s “one achieves.” The delay makes the achievement feel belated, as if the speaker has to search for the verb just as one searches old photographs for a vanished self.
The album and gallery imagery gives memory a physical, almost architectural weight. “Crusty leaves” makes the pages sound brittle, aged, perhaps uncared for, while “faces and the scenes recall” blurs the line between seeing and remembering. In the second quatrain, the speaker wanders down a “broad-arch gallery,” viewing “the scenes from life on either side,” as though a lifetime has been hung on walls and the speaker is walking past it. But the key word is “part”: pressed forward “with the force of years,” the viewer catches only “part of every picture when espied.” The passive construction matters—no one chooses the pace; the years do the pressing. The gallery becomes a metaphor for a life where complete understanding is impossible, not because the pictures are hidden, but because there is never enough time to look.
The third quatrain shifts scale from intimate keepsakes to the cosmos. The “big sun in its blue dome” keeps its course “without a falter,” and that regularity is both beautiful and cold. Human life, by contrast, is “overtaken by the close of day.” The verb “overtaken” suggests being caught from behind, perhaps by surprise, despite the sun’s visible path. The phrase “returning to its source” gives the ending a spiritual or elemental dimension, as if death is less an interruption than a return. Yet the poem does not soften the fact: the close of day arrives, and it arrives for everyone.
The final couplet is the most compressed and difficult part of the poem. “To dream, and being rudely waked from thought, / Return to peaceful dreaming dearly bought.” The line hovers between wishing for peace and recognizing its cost. Waking “from thought” is strange—thought itself is the dream, and the rude waking may be death, loss, or simply the intrusion of reality. To return to “peaceful dreaming” is “dearly bought,” meaning the calm is paid for with grief, effort, or age. The poem’s significance lies in this refusal to offer easy comfort. It turns the conventional sunset-of-life metaphor into a sharper meditation on partial knowledge: we see only fragments, we are moved along against our will, and the peace we imagine at day’s end is not free.