Introduction & Overview of Daylights by Rosanna Warren

Daylights Introduction

"Daylights" was first published in the literary magazine Shenandoah and appears in Rosanna Warren's first full-length collection of poetry Each Leaf Shines Separate, published in 1984. It is a short poem—only twenty-eight lines in two free-verse stanzas—and, like other poems in the collection, was inspired by a famous poem. Many of the poems in the collection are also about paintings and other works of art. Using the second person "you," Warren details the response of the speaker to witnessing a New York City robbery. Full of colorful visual imagery and symbolism, the poem relates the speaker's hyper-awareness of her surroundings and her own mortality. Warren claims the poem speaks to French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's well-known poem "L'Azur," ("The Azure") and to the obsession of European romantics and symbolists with transcendental blue. Mallarmé's poem, published when he was twenty-four, isn't so much a description of the sky as it is of...
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