Sunset in this poem is a small breakup staged on a very large scale. At 6.30pm the sun takes "its last breath before it is / returned to its rightful lover," as if daylight had only ever been on loan. The poem is about trying to forget someone on schedule, and about how badly that effort goes. Everything in the first stanza insists that loss is natural, even beautiful: "a certain glory to the act of erasing resides / in the dying glow of the auburn sky." The ending quietly shows how hard that argument is to live by.
The most interesting choice is the speaker's distance from their own feelings. For sixteen lines there is no "I", only "the bystander," "they" and "you." The sunbirds cry, but the poem tells us they "remember / naught," as though forgetting were something the world performs for us. Yet what they have supposedly forgotten is specific and tender: "the outline of your skin, the / glistening voice." Forgetting is announced in the language of memory. The same happens with "a new dawn, they say, / rid of all sentimentality." The phrase "they say" shows this advice comes from outside, and a dawn arriving at dusk is a mismatch that exposes how hollow it is. The sentimentality has not gone anywhere, because it fills the lines meant to deny it.
The shortest sentence in the stanza, "the air quivers," is where that denial cracks. After all the smooth, reasoned phrasing it is a physical tremor, and it could belong to the evening air or to the person breathing it. Judging by the way the poem splits into "i" and "the bystander" at the end, the bystander may be the speaker's own detached self, the part that watches calmly while the other part acts.
The structure supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, written entirely in lowercase, even at the start of sentences, which gives it the hush of a private confession. The first stanza is a dense block of enjambed lines that spill over mid-phrase ("before it is / returned," "knowing yet / their time has been lost"). Syntax keeps pushing forward while meaning hesitates, much like someone talking quickly to avoid a silence. Sound ties the passage together: the soft *gl-* of "glimmers," "glistening," "glory" and "glow" makes light the poem's main music, so the images of beauty and the images of ending become the same thing. "Fate's hands / nestled upon circumstance" is a quietly clever image, since fate's hands do nothing violent but simply rest, and the speaker is left with no one to blame. The exact time, "6.30pm," also stands out. It is a clinical detail amid lyrical language, as though the speaker were checking a clock to prove they are in control.
Then comes the two-line stanza, where the poem finally says "i." The speaker lifts a lighter "to the painting you left." Here the theory of erasing turns into an act, and the earlier phrases ("the act of erasing," "rid of all sentimentality") read differently. A lighter is a tiny sun, a borrowed flame like the one that has just been returned, and a burning painting would make its own "dying glow." The poem even suggests the sky at sunset is a kind of painting that is being undone. Notice that it stops before the flame touches the canvas. We never learn whether the speaker burns it, which keeps the moment suspended between wanting to forget and being unable to.
The last line, "the bystander looks towards the night," mirrors the previous one in structure but turns away from the painting. The speaker has chosen not to watch what they are doing, which may be the most honest gesture in the poem.
What makes the piece worth reading is this gap between what it says and what it shows. It claims sunset teaches us to let go gracefully, but its images, from the quivering air to the lifted lighter, show how difficult letting go is. The title, with its translation in guillemets, "of the sun," suggests the whole scene belongs to the sun, which sets on schedule while the person watching is not so easily able to do the same.