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by Tony Harrison
Harrison reports from besieged Sarajevo, where young couples flirt in the dark streets between sniper fire and shell craters - the persistence of ordinary life inside war. First published in The Guardian in 1995 while Harrison was working as a war correspondent.
Anthology version: The Edexcel IGCSE Anthology Issue 2 prints this poem with additional stanza breaks not present in Harrison’s original 1995 Guardian publication or the Bloodaxe collected edition. Students preparing for Edexcel must use the anthology layout when discussing structure - not the original layout (often reproduced online).
If you compare a copy of the poem you have found online (or in an earlier Bloodaxe collection) with the Edexcel anthology, the line content will match but the stanza breaks will not. Always quote line numbers and stanza positions from the anthology, and describe the structural effects (pause, white space, shifts of focus) using the breaks as the anthology prints them.
Siege of Sarajevo (1992-95): The poem is set during the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army surrounded Sarajevo and bombarded it with artillery and sniper fire from the surrounding hills for nearly four years. Around 11,000 people were killed, including more than 1,500 children. Civilians queued for bread and water under fire; shell craters in the pavement (later filled with red resin and known as Sarajevo Roses) marked where mortar rounds had killed people.
Harrison as war correspondent: Tony Harrison (born 1937, Leeds) was sent to Sarajevo by The Guardian in 1995 to write poems as journalism, dispatched directly from the front. “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” appeared in the paper alongside news copy. The poem deliberately blends reportage with lyric: the speaker has clearly walked the streets he describes, stepping over the same shell holes and watching the same young couples meeting in the blackout.
The poem is written in rhyming couplets (largely loose iambic pentameter), giving the verse a steady, walking rhythm that mirrors the speaker’s movement through the streets. The couplets sit awkwardly against the brutal subject matter - a reminder that Harrison wants the music of the poem to feel almost out of place in a war zone, the way the young couples themselves are.
Stanza layout: Use the Edexcel Anthology Issue 2 printing as your reference text. The anthology layout introduces stanza breaks that the original Guardian and earlier Bloodaxe printings do not have, so structural points (where a section ends, where the focus shifts from queueing for bread to the couples in the square, where the speaker pulls back to the stars) should be made against the anthology breaks. Do not describe the poem as a single continuous block - the version you are examined on is segmented.
Key structural effects to notice in the anthology layout: the shift from the daytime queues and shell-craters to the night-time meeting between the young man and woman; the way the white space between stanzas slows the reader before Harrison returns to the stars and the couple looking up; and the closing couplet’s quiet hopefulness after the violence catalogued earlier.
“The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” by Tony Harrison was first published in The Guardian in 1995 and is collected in Harrison’s work published by Bloodaxe Books, who hold the rights. The poem is reproduced in the Edexcel IGCSE Anthology Issue 2 under licence. The English Hub does not reproduce the full text of the poem; quotation here is for the purposes of criticism and study only. Students should work from a licensed copy of the Edexcel anthology.