One of the key metaphors of [Light Around the Body], suggested in the title and alluded to in virtually every poem in the volume, is the metaphor which encompasses the dichotomy of light and darkness….

Light begins in a kind of twilight zone in which light and darkness seem to vie with one another for dominance. This is one of the ways in which Bly utilizes Boehme's notion of the "Two Worlds," a notion which Boehme tended, often, to describe in terms of a light-dark dichotomy….

[In] the first section of Light, "Commuters arrive … at dusk like moles / Or hares flying from a fire behind them…. Their trains come through the air like a dark music." These commuting executives exist in the world, unaware of the shadings of light and darkness which surround them. (p. 76)

The next two sections of the book are dominated by darkness as Bly...