Anthology Part 2 - The Bright Lights of Sarajevo

City under siege and the observing voice

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo

By Tony Harrison

[1] After the hours that Sarajevans pass
[2] queuing with empty canisters of gas
[3] to get the refills they wheel home in prams,
[4] or queuing for the precious meagre grams
[5] of bread they’re rationed to each day,
[6] and often dodging snipers on the way,
[7] or struggling up sometimes eleven flights
[8] of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights
[9] of Sarajevo would be totally devoid
[10] of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,
[11] but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –

[12] The young go walking at stroller’s pace,
[13] black shapes impossible to mark
[14] as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.
[15] In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who
[16] calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh.
[17] All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,
[18] no torches guide them, but they don’t collide
[19] except as one of the flirtatious ploys
[20] when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s.

[21] Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
[22] shows by its signals she approves his choice.
[23] Then match or lighter to a cigarette
[24] to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

[25] And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
[26] beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test
[27] and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
[28] and lead her away from where they stand
[29] on two shell scars, where, in ‘92
[30] Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
[31] and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
[32] lay on the pavement with the broken dead.
[33] And at their feet in holes made by the mortar
[34] that caused the massacre, now full of water
[35] from the rain that’s poured down half the day,
[36] though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,
[37] leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky
[38] ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,
[39] in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees
[40] fragments of the splintered Pleiades,
[41] sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells
[42] splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.

[43] The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away
[44] to share one coffee in a candlelit café
[45] until the curfew, and he holds her hand
[46] behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.

Notes

Pleiades: a cluster of stars. Curfew: a restriction on being outdoors at specified times.

Reading the situation

This is a poem, presented in the current anthology as 46 lines arranged in five stanzas. Read the complete poem below once for situation before looking for methods. Ask a simple question: what continues to happen in this city, despite everything that should prevent it?

The setting is Sarajevo during the 1992-95 siege. Civilians faced shelling, sniper fire and severe shortages of food, water, gas and electricity. That context matters because it makes the opening actions - queuing, carrying and walking - acts of necessary daily life under threat. It is not a separate paragraph to bolt onto an answer.

The poem's route

The poem is not simply a sequence of war facts. Its movement tests an assumption. The long opening makes the reader expect absence; the night-time walkers disprove that expectation; the final details then prevent their persistence from becoming a neat victory story.

Who is looking?

The speaker is an observing witness, not one of the courting pair. Early second-person phrases invite the reader to share an expectation about the empty streets. Near the centre, first person makes the act of watching explicit. The qualification I think matters too: the speaker can see gestures, but cannot know the couple's minds with certainty.

That limited position creates a useful balance. The voice is close enough to notice a tone, a brief flame and a hand movement, yet cautious enough not to become all-knowing. Tony Harrison's work as a newspaper correspondent explains the source situation, but the speaker remains a voice constructed by the poem. In analysis, write the speaker observes or Harrison constructs the speaker, not automatically Harrison feels.

Darkness, light and human connection

A topic label such as war and love is too broad to guide an essay. Turn it into propositions that can be tested against the whole poem:

• ordinary routines and courtship persist amid deprivation and attack;
• darkness temporarily obscures visible ethnic divisions and allows people to meet as human figures;
• small, tender lights and the bright traces of violence exist in the same streets.

Each proposition contains tension. That tension is where the poem becomes interesting.

Darkness does more than one job

The walkers are impossible to mark as Muslim, Serb or Croat. Mark may mean identify, but in a city exposed to weapons it can also carry the disturbing suggestion of marking a target. Darkness protects the walkers from immediate visual classification, while also reducing individuals to black shapes.

The three names for bread acknowledge linguistic difference. Yet all three name the same necessity, and the darkness makes the speakers indistinguishable until they speak. This does not prove that ethnic identities or the conflict have disappeared. It creates a temporary night-time condition in which visible sorting is suspended and a shared human need becomes more prominent.

Light reveals and endangers

Trace each light by asking who benefits from it.

The title's Bright Lights can therefore sound inviting, ironic and literal at once. There are real lights, but none belongs to a secure, glittering nightlife.

Choosing evidence that can carry an argument

Suppose the focus is love during conflict. Three references are plausible:

• stroller's pace establishes ordinary, unhurried persistence, but it says little about mutual understanding;
• tender radar brings affection and military detection into two words, so it can support a developed language point;
• the final held hand shows the relationship's progress, but it needs the curfew and sandbags beside it to avoid a hope-only reading.

For close analysis, tender radar is the strongest starting point. Tender suggests care and sensitivity; radar detects something that cannot be seen. The metaphor turns tone of voice into a way of locating mutual interest in darkness. Its military field also shows how siege language has entered ordinary intimacy. Alternatively, the lovers can be read as reclaiming detection: their signals seek consent and connection rather than a target.

Notice the difference between two explanations:

The metaphor creates impact and shows love.

This leaves the work of the words unexplained.

By combining gentleness with a military system of detection, tender radar makes courtship sound adapted to siege conditions: the pair read voice where sight is unsafe, repurposing the language of conflict for mutual choice.

The revision names the collision of meanings, explains how it works in the scene and connects it to an idea about ordinary life under war.

Couplets, enjambment and narrowing focus

Form is not a list beside the poem. It is the pattern that carries the poem's developing thought.

Inspect the poem from a distance

• Stanza and visual shape: five stanzas contain 11, 9, 4, 18 and 4 lines. Breaks mark the move to young walkers, the stages of courtship, the particular pair, and their final move to the café. The longest stanza holds the couple beside remembered violence and reflected stars; the short final stanza returns to intimacy under restriction.
• Rhyme: successive pairs of lines rhyme, sometimes fully and sometimes approximately. The couplets can echo human pairing and the poem's paired oppositions. The rhyme of case and pace crosses the first stanza break, connecting the overturned expectation to the young walkers who answer it.
• Rhythm: a broadly steady, speech-like or walking beat persists, but stress and line length vary. It is safer and more accurate to discuss that movement than to claim an unbroken strict metre.
• Enjambment: clauses repeatedly run over line endings and sometimes over the expected closure of a couplet. Rhyme offers order; syntax keeps moving.
• Caesura and hesitation: internal punctuation can check the flow. The parenthetical I think slows the observation and makes its uncertainty audible.
• Repetition: repeated Then steps through stages of courtship, while recurring dark and shape hold anonymity in view. There is no formal refrain.