Tiffany's "Light" announces a street twice, as if the speaker were correcting a first attempt. The first version is pretty: daffodils and "bright red roses / That no one dares / To take." The second is stripped back: "Somewhere around here," a "wide / Straight line" with one house along the right. That vagueness matters. This is not a real address but a place in the mind, half remembered and half invented, and it darkens quickly. The sky is "pitch black," and so is the house. Then the speaker slips into "you": "you couldn't / See a thing." The shift from describing the street to addressing the reader puts us in the dark as well.
The central idea is that hope does not need the dark to disappear. It needs someone to keep walking toward a small light and to say so out loud. The light itself is modest. "At the end / There is a small / Little light" is slightly clumsy on purpose, with "small" and "little" stacked together and split across a line break, as if the speaker were shrinking it further. Then it is named as "a simple / Street lamp." It is no star or sunrise, only an ordinary object that happens to be lit.
The word "dare" ties the poem together. It first appears in the opening, where nobody "dares" to pick the flowers. It returns when the speaker thinks, "How do you dare / To survive / In such darkness / That you cannot see / Through." Judging by the phrasing, the "you" here is the lamp itself, which seems almost reckless for glowing in so much black. Both uses are about courage, and the couple supply the answer. They dare in the only way the poem allows, by moving toward the light and speaking.
The couple arrive late, and they bring weather with them. Rain has not been mentioned until they "stand in the rain / Trying to reach the light." The image is oddly balanced. They are standing, yet trying, so the poem leaves it open whether they are stuck or just pausing to gather themselves. Their speech is quiet ("softly they say"), and the word "Soon" is left alone on its own line, hanging there like the thing it promises. They hold "hand in hand," and their comfort comes in a very worn phrase: "'Its the light at the end of the tunnel.'"
That cliché is the poem's cleverest move. Read back through the opening and the street has become a tunnel: long, straight, dark, with a single point of light at the far end. The poem builds the situation the saying describes, so the tired expression gets its meaning back. The word "simple" appears twice, first for the lamp and then for what the couple say ("a simple / 'Its the light...'"). The poem seems to know that comfort is often plain, and that it is not weaker for it.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, only free verse in short lines of two to four words. The line breaks ("To take," "See a thing," "Soon") make the reader step carefully, which suits a poem about walking in the dark. Repetition does the work that rhyme might have done. "There's a street" opens two sections, and the couple's reassurance returns in the final line: "We'll be there soon." The ending is a refrain, almost a chant, not an arrival. The couple never reach the lamp within the poem, and the poem does not need them to.
The contrast between the flowers and the lamp may be the most interesting thing in it. The daffodils and "bright red roses" are vivid, but nobody touches them. The light is dim and plain, and people stand in the rain reaching for it. Whatever the poem means by hope, it is not bright certainty. It is the willingness to head for something small and keep saying "soon," with someone's hand in yours.
That is what makes "Light" worth reading. It takes a phrase we hear so often it slides past us and sets it on a street at night, in the rain, spoken by two people. The speaker's question about how anything survives such darkness is answered by the couple's quiet insistence, not by an argument.