Context: Situation and Setting

"Aubade on East 12th Street" by August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler was born and raised in New Jersey. In addition to majoring in English, Kleinzahler worked multiple blue-collar jobs. Latterly, he has taught Creative Writing at Brown University. 

Aubade on East 12th Street

The skylight silvers
and a faint shudder from the undergroundtravels up the building's steel.

Dawn breaks across this wildernessof roofs with their old wooden storage tanksand caps of louvered cowlings

moving in the wind. Your back,raised hip and thighwell-tooled as a rounded baluster

on a lathe of shadow and light.

In this poem Kleinzahler is describing the sunrise on one particular morning. He is illustrating the breaking of dawn. He uses explicit descriptions to bring his readers into the poem. In the first stanza it is almost as if we can feel the "faint shudder from underground" and see the "skylight silvers… travel up the building's steel." For Kleinzahler to choose the wilderness to compare the city to is quite ironic but works perfectly in this situation. Both are always changing and bustling with life. This poem is set in a city, most likely New York City, as dawn breaks. The author does a fantastic job describing the setting for us. With the ground shuddering from the underground, rays of light twinkling against the silver buildings,dawn breaks in the forever moving and changing city. The situation of this particular poem is a person, most likely the author, watching the sunrise from 12th street. He witnesses everything that he puts into the poem. It is possible that he is watching all of this occur from the top of a skyscraper building looking down on the city.