Young

The “wise stars” (Line 8) receive high status in this poem as they are positioned above the speaker literally and physically. The speaker mentions the stars more than once in the poem. While she merely mentions her parents, she talks to the stars, telling them “[her] questions” (Line 20). This sharing of personal longings and thoughts gives the stars a humanistic and, even more specifically, a companionate quality for a speaker otherwise known as “a lonely kid” (Line 2). On a dark summer night, the stars brightly shine, even more intensely and invitingly than the “yellow heat” (Line 10) coming out of her mother’s window. At the end of the poem, the speaker mentions God, and the stars almost take on a spiritual dimension, a visible way to talk to a higher being and receive feedback from the shifting light in the sky.

Windows are often symbols of an opening, an opportunity, or transparency. In this poem, the windows show snippets of the speaker’s parents, but they seem to distance the parents from their daughter. It appears as if each of the parent’s windows provides an oasis for only one, protecting secrets. The speaker sees only the “yellow heat running out” (Line 10) of her mother’s window, implying the mother is merely smoke, not flesh and blood. The father’s window is even less accessible, as it is “half shut” (Line 11), like an eye. These lines referencing the windows seem to widen both the physical and the emotional gap between the speaker and her parents, making her seem like an outsider to her own childhood home.