first light analysis

             To most individuals the imagery of light, morning, family, and household all represent positive thoughts. However in "First Light," written bye Thomas Kinsella, positive imagery is described by using very negative words, contrasting the mood. This provides great insight as to the darkness that the family described is going through.
             By first reading the title of Kinsella's work, the reader encounters very positive energy. "First light," could be considered morning where the sun peaks over the ocean and land eventually bringing light into an otherwise pitch-black household. In a more metaphorical sense, it can be considered a new beginning or cleansing. However, once the reader comes across the first line, "A prone couple still sleeps," a very different mood is cast upon the poem. Instead of illustrating a couple still quiet asleep from the previous night as light rushes in upon them in a serene environment, a scene is depicted in which a couple lays silent and vulnerable, prone to the world around them, which they are not ready to accept. "Light ascends like a pale gas," (line 2) describes, not a pleasant light breathing life into the outskirts of the house, but a poisonous gas that creeps in slowly foreboding death and despair. The outside of the house, with its ever-growing garden and thick green grass is described as a "dark garden" with "grass, (emerging), soaking with gray dew," (line 5-6). Instead of the pure water in the dew breathing life into the grass, it is described as almost drowning it and sucking the life out with its gray hue.
             As we are moved further into the house, "an empty/Kitchen takes form," (line 8-9). Light doesn't normally create things, nor have them take form. It uncovers them out of darkness, however Kinsella uses this imagery of taking form almost as if the Kitchen were a blo
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