Louis Simpson’s “Summer Morning” begins almost as an urban documentary: whole blocks in New York where no one lives, small factories, a hotel room. But the poem’s true subject is not the city; it is the distance between people who make things and a speaker who, by his own account, has made of his life a secret.
The opening lines are deliberately flat. “There are whole blocks in New York / Where no one lives — / A district of small factories.” The dash after “lives” pauses on the absence, then lets the next line revise the statement: not a desert, but a place purely of production, not dwelling. From that empty street the poem moves indoors, to a hotel and a morning “when I was there with a girl.” The girl is unnamed; she belongs to memory, and later she is folded into a single word, “assignation.” Across the window, men and women work at machines. The window creates a double frame: the speaker watches from a private, temporary room while the workers are visible in their labor. Simpson does not moralise about work. He adds one small human signal: “Now and then one looked up.” That glance crosses the gap, and briefly the workers stop being a backdrop. They look back.
The poem’s pivot is the two-line stanza: “Toys, hardware — whatever they made, / It’s been worn out.” The list and the dash make the products sound almost arbitrary; “whatever” shrugs at the exact kind of manufacture. Yet “It’s been worn out” lands with surprising weight. The singular pronoun gathers toys, hardware, machinery, even the remembered morning into one condition: time has used everything up. Placed just before the speaker’s self-assessment, the line turns the worn-out products into a mirror. He too is older.
Then comes the confession: “So I have spoiled my chances. / For what? Sheer laziness, / The thrill of an assignation, / My life that I hold in secret.” The question cuts two ways. It asks what the chances were spoiled for, and it also sounds like self-disgust—was any of it worth it? The answer is given as three overlapping causes. “Sheer laziness” is blunt and moral. “The thrill of an assignation” glances back to the hotel and to the secret erotic charge of the opening scene. The final phrase is the most severe because it turns that thrill into a condition. To hold one’s life in secret is to refuse to spend or risk it. It may feel like freedom, but the poem implies that such holding is another kind of waste.
Simpson uses no rhyme and no regular metre. The line lengths are uneven, and the short lines slow the reader so each phrase is weighed. Several lines end on unglamorous or surprising words—“opposite,” “made,” “secret”—which keeps the poem close to speech. The diction is plain: “blocks,” “factories,” “toys,” “hardware,” “bad years and good.” The one elevated word is “assignation,” with its suggestion of arranged, possibly illicit meeting. Set among the industrial nouns, it stands out as the single ornament, and it names the speaker’s chief pleasure. The title “Summer Morning” promises brightness, freshness, erotic possibility, but the poem opens onto an empty district and then into middle-aged retrospect. In that gap between the title’s promise and the poem’s tone lies much of its force.
The poem matters because it does not turn regret into a neat lesson. It never says what the speaker’s chances were or whether they might be recovered. Instead it holds two images side by side: workers whose products wear out, and a man whose hidden life has, by his own account, spoiled his chances. The products at least existed before they wore out. The life held in secret may never have been lived openly at all.