Squire's night in the city begins with the moon and ends with it, and everything that matters happens in between. Over four quatrains the poem moves from sky to factory floor to dinner table and back to the skyline, like a camera that descends and then pulls away again. Its central idea is that a city's shine is paid for by people who are conveniently forgotten by morning.
The opening stanza is deceptively gentle. The moon "hangs low" and is "breathing sleeplessness," which makes the whole city sound like one insomniac. The smokestacks are "endless" and blur the air, yet the stanza ends on "grey fills the sky, soft and slow." The soft *s* and *l* sounds and the long *o* make pollution sound like a lullaby. That softness works like an anaesthetic, and the poem is in no hurry to wake us from it.
The second stanza breaks the spell. "The midnight oil burns on" takes a familiar phrase about working late and makes it literal, so that it turns into "fumes choking assembly lines." The sounds harden: "grubby fingers get caught in gears" is full of clipped *g* and *c* sounds that seem to catch and grind. The workers have been shrunk to a body part, and then comes "pulverized by steel, all but gone." The violent verb is followed by a shrug. "All but gone" could describe the fingers or the whole person, and the poem doesn't say which. There are no names, no outcry and no explanation. The flat tone is where the horror lives.
In the third stanza, fingers are matched by another body-free object: "the wineglasses clink." The people at the celebration are reduced to their glasses just as the workers were reduced to their hands. The two groups never meet, but the poem sets them side by side. The diners celebrate "good business and money," a phrase far vaguer than the gears and steel before it, as if they never look closely at what produces their profit. The stanza ends with "the debt in which they'll sink." The poem doesn't choose between financial and moral debt, and the line works as a warning either way. The rhyme of "clink" with "sink" turns the cheerful sound of glass into the sound of going under.
The form supports this. Each stanza rhymes only its first and last lines: low/slow, on/gone, clink/sink, flees/breeze. The middle lines, which hold the smokestacks, the gears, the money and the gold, sit unrhymed inside that frame, like things boxed in by the city. Depending on accent, "on" and "gone" are a full or near rhyme, and the instability suits a worker who is "on" one moment and "gone" the next. The rhythm is loose, roughly four beats a line with no fixed metre. The lowercase lines and the single comma give it the feel of speech rather than polish. The tag attached to the poem (1925, day 17, freewrite) suggests, as an inference, a quick daily writing exercise, and that fits the unpolished feel. The poem still keeps a tidy structure.
The final stanza closes the circle. The moon returns, now fading, and the skyline is "made of liquid gold." The phrase can suggest wine, molten metal and money at once, so the beauty of the morning is made of the same materials as the night's cost. Then the poem's last move is forgetting: "memories of the night faint / carried away by the city's breeze." The air that choked the assembly lines now clears the evidence away, and forgetting happens as naturally as weather. The soft ending echoes "soft and slow" from the first stanza, which suggests the cycle will simply begin again tonight.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Squire never lectures or says "unfair." The sounds and the images do the arguing, and the reader is left to notice that the gold skyline and the lost fingers belong to the same picture.