Daylights Study Guide & Notes

Daylights Poem Summary

Preview of Daylights Summary:

Lines 1-7

In these lines the speaker describes an incident in which she is figuratively "wounded" by the sky after witnessing a liquor store robbery in which a window is smashed. It is important to understand that the speaker is not cut by the "glass shard" in the second line. The proximity of the image, however, evokes the extent to which she has been psychologically harmed by the sky. The "you" is a projection of the speaker. The "They" in the third line probably refers to the symbolists, a group of nineteenth-century poets including Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and others for whom blue symbolized the impossibility and the promise of desire. The speaker, like the boy who had just robbed the liquor store of a bottle of scotch, zigzags between the present and her thoughts on the significance of what is happening. "Those Grecian dreams" refer to the writer's own...
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