The title is an order, «Look At A Sunset.», but the poem itself is a confession. Once inside, the command becomes "Sometimes I look," a private habit instead of advice. Nothing happens in the poem. The speaker looks and wishes, three times over, and the repetition suggests a wish that comes round often and is never acted on. Its central idea is that freedom, for this speaker, is defined less by what they would gain than by who would no longer be watching.
The poem has no rhyme, no regular metre and no punctuation, so it reads like a thought spoken aloud in one breath. The structure comes from the refrain, "Sometimes I look at a sunset / And wish I could be." The poem has no stanza breaks, but this phrase divides it into three movements, and each is shaped differently. The first is a small, concrete picture. The second is longer and more abstract. The third is a single word. The poem expands and then collapses, and it ends where it can go no further. The refrain also stops mid-sentence each time. "Wish I could be" is left hanging at the line break, and the answer comes only on the next line. The verb is simply "be," as if existing is what the speaker wants, not doing anything in particular.
The imagery in the first movement is almost childlike: "a tree house in the tallest tree," sleeping "under the stars." It is also a clever choice, because a tree house is both open and unreachable. You are outdoors, exposed to the sky, but high enough that nobody can walk up and find you. The stars follow naturally from the sunset, so the wish carries the evening on into the night.
The middle section is where the poem reveals what it is really about, and the language changes with it. The pictures give way to abstractions: "judge," "create," "from scratch." That last phrase comes from the kitchen, a homely idiom, and it turns a whole life into something to be made without a ready-made recipe. The speaker doesn't only want to escape other people but to build a self that hasn't been shaped by their opinions. Then there is the word "humans." A speaker who said "people" would sound like one of us. "Humans" sounds like someone observing the species from the outside, which says a lot about how distant they feel. The sentence also runs across three lines, "create / a life from scratch without / Ever talking to humans," and the line break leaves "without" hanging at the end, so the absence is built into the shape of the verse.
The wishes are defined mostly by negatives: no one judging, no talking, no humans. Freedom here means freedom from, and the poem seems to know it. When the final movement arrives there is no tree house and no wild, only "Free," alone on its line, with no "where" attached. The longing has outgrown any particular place.
There is a gentle irony in the poem too. A speaker who never wants to talk to humans has written something for humans to read. Judging by the text alone, the poem looks like a compromise, a way of saying the wish out loud without having to say it to anyone's face. The third refrain even slips into "Sometimes I looks at a sunset." Whether that is deliberate or an accident, it adds to the unpolished, unguarded feel, and it is hard to imagine a self-conscious speaker leaving it in.
The poem's significance lies in this plainness. It makes no grand claims and uses no elaborate metaphors. "Sometimes" keeps the feeling honest, because this is an occasional ache that a sunset happens to set off, not a permanent state. The sunset itself is a good trigger. It is the one wild spectacle almost anyone can see, and it marks the end of the day's social demands. Many readers will recognise that moment of looking at the horizon and wanting, briefly and completely, to be somewhere else and no one in particular. The poem's last word gives that feeling its simplest name.