The Full Text of “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”
The Full Text of “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Introduction
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The English poet Tony Harrison wrote "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" when on assignment for the Guardian newspaper during the bloody Bosnian War. "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" observes the Sarajevans' determination to go on living despite their horrific circumstances, and particularly focuses on the nighttime courtship of young men and women. Love and life, this poem suggests, somehow manage to persist even in the most terrible times. The poem first appeared in the Guardian in 1995.
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Summary
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The speaker observes Sarajevans trying to get by during the terrible Siege of Sarajevo. During the day, the speaker notes, Sarajevans spend many hours waiting in line to refill gas cans (which they take home in strollers), avoiding sniper fire to pick up their bread rations, and hauling heavy containers of water up the stairs to their apartments. After all that, the speaker says, one might expect that no one would go out into the bombed-out streets in the evenings. But one would be wrong!
Though people who don't live in wartime might find it surprising, young people in Sarajevo still go out at night to walk calmly and confidently through the streets. In the dark, they appear as vague shadows that can't be categorized by ethnic group (in spite of the fact that supposed ethnic divisions drive this war). In these dark streets, you can't tell who speaks what language or belongs to what group. Young people of all backgrounds amble through the streets at an unhurried pace, with no flashlights to light the way. Even though it's dark, they don't crash into each other unless it's on purpose, a way of flirting when a boy likes a girl's looks.
In the dark, the speaker observes, the boys have to judge by the sound of the girls' voices whether they're open to flirting or not. The boys light cigarettes just to get a glimpse of the girls' eyes in the brief flicker of light, to check if they're getting somewhere.
Now, the speaker sees a young couple who are clearly already into each other. They looks like they're about to go look for a nicer place to hang out than the one where they stand now: on the craters of a mortar attack that happened in 1992. In this attack, bombs killed and wounded people who were standing in line to buy bread. In the aftermath, torn, bloody bread lay among torn, bloody bodies. The holes created by that attack are still at the young couple's feet, and now full of rain water. It's been raining for half the day, although now there isn't a cloud in the sky. In fact, the night sky is clear and full of stars—perfect conditions for bomber pilots. In the deep, dark shell-hole puddles, the boy can see broken reflections of the stars.
As the speaker watches, the boy leads the girl through the dark to a dimly lit café, where they'll have a coffee together until they have to go home (because of the curfew). The boy takes the girl's hand as they sit behind sandbags that were once full of flour rations.
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Themes
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The Persistence and Power of Love
In "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo," love survives and perhaps even flourishes under the most difficult of circumstances. In the war-torn Bosnian city of Sarajevo, the speaker says, everyone lives with the knowledge that they could be killed at any moment by bombs or snipers. And yet, at night, the city’s young people come out to flirt with each other, determined to live some semblance of a normal existence—and to do so together. The poem thus portrays romance as both a heroic choice and a hopeful, transformative force.
Life under the Sarajevo siege is fraught with constant danger. The Sarajevans try to go about their daily lives as normally as possible, but they’re always aware that they might be killed at any moment. The streets are scarred with the "death-deep, death dark wells" of shell craters and bullet holes. And just to get basic supplies, people must dodge the snipers hidden away in hotels and surrounding mountains. Merely to try and live is to risk dying. Given the circumstances, the speaker says, one might expect the people of Sarajevo to hide themselves away.
But even these dangers can’t stop young people from heading out into the streets at night looking for love. In fact, the promise of love seems to transform the whole atmosphere of the city at night. As the young people go out to look for romance, the night’s darkness stops feeling so threatening: instead, it turns the young people into mysterious and alluring shadows who bump “flirtatious[ly]” into each other, almost as if the sunset signals the start of a masquerade ball.
Love, or its promise, thus transforms the city. One particular young couple meets on a street where, not so long ago, civilians were massacred while waiting to get bread—and even the shell-holes reflect the "splintered" image of the stars, classic symbols of fate and romance. The young people’s determination to find love both persists in the face of terrible violence and briefly transforms the hellish city into a more hopeful and beautiful place.
But the poem isn’t naïvely idealistic. Love does change the world for the better. But that doesn’t erase the reality of violence, tragedy, and terror. The poem balances its images of young couples flirting with stark reminders that any day or night could be those couples’ last—and that the war forces people to endure awful circumstances on a daily basis.
For instance, the speaker observes a young man and woman going for a coffee, which would be a perfectly regular date except for the fact they have to sit behind "AID flour sacks refilled with sand"—put there to absorb the shock of an explosion. The poem thus celebrates, not just love’s ability to bring people together, but the young people’s bravery in daring to love even in the most appalling circumstances. Love, the poem suggests, can be an act of hope and courage, and even rebellion.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 8-46
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Wartime Life
Set during the longest-running siege of the modern era and based on first-hand experience, "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" chronicles the terrible everyday reality of war for those unlucky enough to live through it. It shows how life as a civilian during wartime becomes a strange kind of routine, an attempt to get by from day to day made terrifying by the ever-present possibility of death. One of the horrors of war, the poem suggests, is the way that its absurdities and terrors come to seem almost routine.
The poem’s details about regular people’s lives during the siege of Sarajevo (which ran from April 1992 till February 1996) suggest that people try to go about their regular business even when they’re surrounded by constant and terrifying violence: war makes getting by much more difficult, but life still goes on. The Sarajevans spend their days trying to supply themselves with the necessities of life: fuel, water, and food. They queue for "meagre grams" of rationed bread, wheel gas canisters home "in prams," and "struggl[e] up sometimes eleven flights/ of stairs with water" (because the supply to their apartments has been cut off). For the Sarajevans, then, the war shapes every aspect of their lives—in particular the things people living in peacetime take for granted.
But the Sarajevans also continue to try to enjoy their lives: the young people, for instance, go out to flirt at night despite all the hardship and suffering around them. The war, then, gets absorbed into everyday reality, becoming a strangely mundane presence. In other words, life goes on—just in a different form. Despite the people’s admirable efforts to live somewhat normal lives, they still have to deal with the fact that they might die at any moment—and that the reasons for all this terror and violence are, at their heart, absurd. For all that war becomes ordinary, the poem suggests, it’s also meaningless and deeply wrong.
A beautiful clear night sky, for example, should be something for Sarajevans to enjoy. But such a "star-filled" evening also creates the perfect conditions for the "bomber's eye,"—that is, the Sarajevans are more likely to get killed when the pilots overhead can see where they're aiming. And such violence, the poem notes, is built on supposed differences so meaningless that they disappear as soon as the night falls: in the dark, the cultural markers that would “distinguish” an enemy from a friend completely vanish, and only people remain. The poem underscores that point by describing an attack in which Sarajevans—not specifically Muslims, Serbs, or Croats, but people from any or all of these warring groups—are killed by mortars while waiting to get bread. A grotesque image of crusts of bread "dunked" in the blood of the dead reminds the reader that this isn't normal life, no matter how familiar people get with it.
Normalizing daily life during a war might be the only way for people to survive—but the poem also stresses that this shouldn't be the case. The contrast between the Sarajevan’s struggle to live, love, and be happy and the terrible bloodshed all around them suggests that one of the real horrors of war is the way it makes fear, violence, and meaningless death part of people’s everyday lives.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-46
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”
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Lines 1-6
After the hours ...
... on the way,This poem takes place during the siege of Sarajevo, a terrible and bloody war that ran from 1992-1996. (See the Context section for more on the complex history of this war.) The speaker—who seems to be an outside observer—opens the poem with a description of the lived daily reality of regular Sarajevans, those people who are just trying to survive from day to day and aren't fighting in the conflict itself.
Lines 1 to 6 act like a kind of report from Sarajevo, telling the reader what life during the siege was actually like. (And indeed, the poet, Tony Harrison, was sent to Sarajevo on assignment by a newspaper.) The details are observational and devoid of any flowery poeticism—this is just a plain description of daily reality.
Life under siege is predictably terrible. Getting the resources most people in peacetime take for granted (fuel, food, and clean water, for instance) all become struggles: Sarajevans risk their lives just to refill their "canisters of gas" or to collect "precious meagre grams" of bread to help them survive.
The poem's first stanza is mostly one long, heavily enjambed sentence—an effect that captures the Sarajevans' tension, restlessness, and exhaustion as they try to get through the day. The poem's rhyming couplets also create a quick and nervous pace, making the poem feel like a quickly sketched report from the heart of the action.
There is also a strange sense of routine at work here. This speaks to the way that wartime life becomes normalized. Determined to survive, people in wartime find a weird rhythm and kind of get used to the experience, even if that experience is tragic, unjust, and absurd.
For instance, the Sarajevans "wheel home" their refilled gas canisters "in prams" (or baby carriages) like grotesque babies: the prams are repurposed for an environment that can't really support regular family life. And they queue like shoppers—but instead of purchasing the goods they want, they take whatever "meagre grams / of bread" they can get.
Bread will play a symbolic role in this poem: it's a food so commonplace that it should symbolize everyday life and the communal experience of eating (breaking bread) together. Here it's a symbol of how little the Sarajevans possess, and later in the poem it reappears to devastating effect. Keep an eye out for it.
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Lines 7-11
or struggling up ...
... the case — -
Lines 12-20
The young go ...
... fancied by some boy’s. -
Lines 21-24
Then the tender ...
... made progress yet. -
Lines 25-32
And I see ...
... the broken dead. -
Lines 33-42
And at their ...
... Serb mortar shells. -
Lines 43-46
The dark boy ...
... refilled with sand.
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Symbols
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Bread
In normal life, bread is a symbol of, well, normal life! Bread is about as ubiquitous and commonplace as food can get. It's cheap, versatile, and very easy to share: it's thus a common image for life and community.
The changing relationship between the Sarajevans and bread thus reveals the traumatic influence of the war on every aspect of their lives. For the Sarajevans, bread is no longer easy and cheap to obtain—it's something that citizen have to queue for, and even "dodg[e] snipers" to get. In wartime, bread becomes a precious commodity and a means of survival.
Bread also symbolizes ethnic division (the main driver of the conflict itself). Whether people call bread hjleb, hleb, or kruh—that is, whether they speak Bosniak, Serb, and Croat respectively—makes a big difference in a place being torn apart by ethnic violence.
The poem also refers to a tragic incident in 1992 in which a mortar hit a breadshop queue, killing and injuring many. The poem's grotesque imagery—"blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread/ lay on this pavement with the broken dead" (lines 31 and 32)—shows the reader how, in war, the mundane and the tragic exist side by side.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 4-6: “or queuing for the precious meagre grams / of bread they’re rationed to each day, / and often dodging snipers on the way,”
- Lines 15-16: “In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who / calls bread / hjleb / or / hleb / or calls it / kruh.”
- Lines 29-32: “in '92 / Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue / and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread / lay on this pavement with the broken dead.”
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Light
The poem's titular "bright lights" symbolize hope in dark times.
When people refer to the "bright lights" of a city, they're usually talking about that city's glamour and excitement. But war-torn Sarajevo doesn't have a lot of glamour and excitement to go around. In fact, its people have to put out even the "bright lights" of their "torches" (or flashlights) at night, for fear they'll become more visible to a sniper.
The real "bright lights" of Sarajevo, then, are the flickers of matchlight that young lovers use to illuminate each other's faces for a moment, in defiance of all the suffering and danger around them. These bright lights are moments in which people reach out to each other in spite of it all.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 18: “no torches guide them”
- Lines 23-24: “Then match or lighter to a cigarette / to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.”
- Line 26: “Match-flare test”
- Line 44: “a candlelit café”
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration dramatizes the poem's images, bringing them to vivid life on the page.
In line 17, for instance, the speaker describes the "stroller's stride" with which the young Sarajevans walk. The two /st/ sounds one after the other mimic the confident one-two "stride" of these courageous kids, who go out to flirt in spite of the danger.
Meanwhile, in the fourth stanza, the speaker switches focus from the young lovers to the aftermath of a terrible mortar attack:
[...] they stand
on two shell splash scars, where, in '92
Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on this pavement with the broken dead.This intense alliterative burst of harsh /s/ sounds, plosive /b/ sounds, and muffled /m/ sounds conveys violence, surprise, and chaos, evoking the shock and misery of this "massacre."
In the same stanza, the speaker mentions "the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky/ ideally bright and clear for bomber's eye" (lines 37-38). Here, alliteration underlines the tension the young lovers live with: the /s/ sound feels whispery and hypnotic, like some kind of love spell being cast over the city—but it also sounds like bullets whistling through the air. And the /b/ sounds again feel shocking and explosive, just like the bombs that "bomber" might drop at any moment.
And the young couple stands by "death-deep, death-dark wells" (line 41), the /d/ alliteration sounding powerful and relentless, as though the city has been permanently changed by what it has witnessed.
When the young couple goes for a coffee, the poem uses a few more moments of alliteration:
The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away
to share one coffee in a candlelit café
until the curfew, and he holds her hand
behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.The /c/ sound here could be read as quiet and intimate, but it's also a little harsh and cutting, perhaps signalling that, for all the young couple's attempt to have a normal date, this is a deeply strange situation. And the /h/ sounds might feel either like a loving sigh or a gasp of fear.
Alliteration thus makes the Sarajevans' predicament feel vivid and immediate.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 10: “streets Serb”
- Line 17: “stroller's stride”
- Line 21: “tender,” “tone”
- Line 28: “stand”
- Line 29: “shell splash scars”
- Line 30: “mortars massacred,” “breadshop”
- Line 31: “blood-dunked,” “bread”
- Line 33: “mortar”
- Line 34: “massacre”
- Line 37: “Sarajevo star-filled,” “sky”
- Line 38: “bright,” “bomber's”
- Line 40: “splintered”
- Line 41: “sprinkled,” “death-deep, death-dark”
- Line 44: “coffee,” “candlelit café”
- Line 45: “curfew,” “he holds her hand”
- Line 46: “sacks,” “sand”
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Imagery
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Repetition
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"The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sarajevans
- Canisters
- Prams
- Meagre
- Snipers
- Serb
- Croat
- Hjleb
- Hleb
- Kruh
- Ploy
- Pleiades
- Splintered
- Curfew
- AID Flour Sacks
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “After the hours that Sarajevans pass”)
Citizens of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”
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Form
"The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" is broken up into five stanzas of varying length, the longest being eighteen lines and the shortest just four. In other words, it doesn't use a standard poetic form, but invents its own!
Still, there's a sound logic to this shape. The poem reads like a dispatch from the frontline of Sarajevo, a sketch that focuses on the things the speaker can see and hear in the moment. If these observations were shaped into neat, ordered, equal-length stanzas, the poem would probably feel less representative of the chaotic, unpredictable nature of the Sarajevo situation itself.
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Meter
The poem uses iambic pentameter: that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here is the meter at work in line 18:
no torch- | es guide | them, but | they don’t | collide
Generally speaking, the meter gives the poem a strong forward momentum, making it feel like the poem takes place almost in real-time, the poet jotting down notes about the scene. This meter reflects the fact that Sarajevo is a dynamic, ever-changing environment, and people live moment to moment.
That said, the poem also often varies its meter—a choice that actually adds to the on-the-ground, journalistic feeling. Pure iambic pentameter can start to sound a bit stately and controlled, which probably wouldn't suit the poem.
The first two lines, for example, both start with trochees (feet that go DUM-da) rather than iambs. This gets the poem off on a heavy footing, which mirrors the frazzled exhaustion of the Sarajevans themselves.
Sometimes the poem loads stresses into a small space, as in line 29:
on two shell splash scars, where, in '92
All four of the words highlighted could receive a stress, making this line tough on the ear. This makes sense, because it's describing a violent event—a much more extreme version of stress and power.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem uses rhyming couplets from start to finish—AABBCC, and so on. These singsongy rhymes have an incongruous comic quality, as if gesturing towards the unspeakable madness of war. They also come thick and fast, making the poem feel quick and dynamic.
And in a way, the whole poem is about a different kind of "coupling"—the search for romance and love. Sarajevo's bright young things go out looking for each other, hoping to find a match and maybe, for a brief moment, think about something other than simply surviving. The choice of couplets, then, mirrors the poem's focus on these Sarajevan pairings.
Sometimes, these couplets are shocking, too: by pitting two unlikely words against each other, they remind the reader that daily life in wartime is never ordinary. The rhyme between "bread" and "dead" in lines 31 and 32, for example, is visceral and unsettling—which fits with the subject matter.
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Speaker
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It's not too much of a stretch to read the speaker as Tony Harrison himself, though this isn't essential for understanding the poem. Harrison was sent to Sarajevo by the Guardian newspaper and wrote three poems based on his experiences.
Regardless of whether one reads the speaker as Harrison himself, the speaker is a closer observer of life in Sarajevo, first providing a sketch of daily life and then focusing on the nighttime activities of the young.
The speaker strikes a conversational tone, addressing the reader directly in line 8 ("you'd think that the nights [...]"). This has a gently confrontational effect, bringing the speaker closer to the action—and horror—of wartime Sarajevo.
And in lines 25 ("And I see...") and 27 ("and he's about, I think..."), the speaker uses the first person, which increases the sense that this poem takes place in real time, while the speaker's right there.
The speaker implicitly admires the ordinary Sarajevans for living their lives in the face of terrors—terrors he also drawing the reader's attention to through vivid descriptions of struggles and massacres (e.g. the reference to the 1992 mortar attack).
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“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Setting
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The poem is set at nighttime in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the epicenter of the Bosnian War, Sarajevo suffered the longest siege in modern history: it ran from April 5, 1992 until February 29, 1996. "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" provides an insight into daily—and nightly—life during this time.
The city is an extremely tough place to live. Basic supplies are running low, and the inhabitants have to risk their lives just to get fuel, food, and water. They live under constant fear of death and are meant to stay at home after the evening curfew. The speaker captures the dangerous drudgery of everyday war in the first stanza, in which "dodging snipers" (line 6) is as much a part of a Sarajevan's day as queuing for rations. Existence is an exhausting combination of the mundane and the tragic, as the reference to the bread shop massacre and its "broken dead" in lines 29 to 32 makes clear.
With that said, Sarajevo is also a resilient place. At night, the youngsters go out looking for love, walking slowly and confidently in a spirit of defiance. A small flame of hope survives against the odds. On this particular night, the young walk the streets and flirt with one another, striking matches or flicking lighters in order to see each other's faces. Perhaps these, then, are the "bright lights of Sarajevo"—small acts of rebellion that prioritize romance over fear.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo”
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Literary Context
Tony Harrison (1937-present) is a prominent English poet and playwright. His work is widely read and performed around the world. Harrison grew up in Leeds in the north of England. A working-class kid, he won a school scholarship and went on to study Classics at university. The early influence of classical literature—particularly the idea of the poet as a kind of public servant—runs throughout his work.
Harrison has travelled widely through his career, living in places as varied as the Czech Republic, Cuba, and Nigeria. "The Bright Lights of Sarajevo" was part of an assignment for the Guardian newspaper, which sent Harrison to Bosnia to provide an eyewitness account of the Bosnian War (1992-1995). This poem is one of a trio of Bosnia poems published in the 2000 collection Laureate's Block and Other Poems; the poems also feature prominently in the newspaper around the time of the war.
This is the best known of those three poems, the other two being "The Cycles of Donji Yakuf" (which describes a party of looters after a battle) and "Essentials" (which focuses on a man trying to decide which of his books to use as fuel for fire). All of these poems are, in a way, reportage. Sarajevans really did often have to sprint across "Sniper Alley" in order go about the business of their day, and the breadshop queue massacre described in lines 29-32 was a real-life event.
Harrison was, of course, far from the only poet writing during the siege of Sarajevo. Readers might be interested to check out the work of Bosnian poets like Semezdin Mehmedinivoć and Goran Simić , both of whom lived and wrote during the longest-running siege in modern history.
Historical Context
The Bosnian War, which ran between 1992 and 1995, had complicated motivating factors informed by centuries of grievances over ethnic and religious divisions. These rifts date back to Ottoman times and beyond, but the more immediate causes of the conflict relate to the fall of Yugoslavia—or, more accurately, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The death in 1980 of Yugoslavia's dictator, Josep Tito, ushered in an era of economic hardship and exposed the fault lines between the Yugoslavian republic's various nations: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.
Soon enough, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence, leaving the future of the entire region uncertain. Bosnia held a referendum on its own independence which was largely boycotted by Serbs, and this provided the corrupt Serbian president Slobodan Milošević with his reason to launch what would become the infamous siege of Sarajevo. As the poem points out, civilians were gunned down by snipers hiding in hotels and the surrounding hillside, and the city was mercilessly shelled, first by the Yugoslav People's Army and, soon after, by the Army of Republika Srpska (the official army of a Serbian breakaway state within Bosnia). The city was decimated and thousands were killed.
Sadly, the Bosnian war was also marked by the first genocide since World War II. The Army of Republika Srpska conducted a widespread genocidal campaign against Bosniak Muslims, killing thousands in Srebrinica in 1995. After much clamor for international intervention, the conflict was brought a tense end by the Dayton Accords in November 1995 (though violence continued afterwards). Many of the main players in the war have since been tried for war crimes by the United Nations.
Though it's now known for being the site of one of the bloodiest—and the longest—sieges in modern history, Sarajevo was once a great example of community cohesion and multiculturalism. Muslim Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats had, for a while at least, lived there together in relative peace.
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More “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” Resources
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External Resources
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The Bosnian War — Learn more about the history of the wider conflict in which the siege of Sarajevo took place.
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Harrison's Influence — Read a discussion of the collection in which this poem was published.
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The Siege of Sarajevo — Read an overview of the longest-running siege in modern history.
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The Poet In His Own Words — Watch a conversation between Tony Harrison and fellow poet Simon Armitage.
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Tony Harrison's Life — Read a biography of Harrison from the Poetry Foundation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Tony Harrison
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