Rinny Templeton's "Lights" is a poem about a city street at night and the strange, brief life of its advertising signs. For two stanzas the signs blaze and chatter, selling coffee, beer, shoe repair and cinema tickets. Then, in the final three lines, they go out, and what remains is darkness, silence and rain. The central idea is a quiet one: all this glittering commercial noise is temporary, and the night underneath it is patient. The poem doesn't state that as a moral. It lets the switch-off do the work.
The structure is simple, and the simplicity is the point. The first two stanzas are built on matching patterns: a pair of short, bouncing lines ("Neon lights / Xeon lights"), a long line about the night, and then a rhyming couplet that quotes the signs themselves. The poem's rhythm is lively, almost like a jingle. The paired openings do something clever with sound. "Neon" and "Xeon" are nearly identical, and "Flashing" and "Dashing" differ by a single letter. The words flicker the way the lights do, swapping one letter for another as if the sign were buzzing between two states. Even the spelling "Xeon" looks like a glitch or a made-up brand name, the kind of word advertisers love because it sounds modern and scientific. The poem borrows the sign-painter's trick of dressing up a word to catch the eye.
The quoted slogans are the most vivid detail. They sit in the poem like fragments of overheard shop-front language, set apart by an indent and joined by dashes: "Floor Show Nightly — Shoes Reheeled," "Monarch Coffee — Vacuum Sealed." Put side by side, they are funny and a little sad. Nightlife and cobbling, coffee and entertainment are all jammed together in the same breathless breath, with no sense of hierarchy. A floor show and a heel repair get equal billing. The second pair is even more telling: "Transients Welcome — Drink Bock Beer / At the National — Movie of the Year." The word "transients" stands out. In a sign it means travellers or people passing through, an invitation to anyone with money to spend. But it quietly describes the signs too, and the whole scene. Everything here is passing through, including the glow itself.
Notice also the verbs. The lights "blink," "flash," "dash" and "send their message." They are active, urgent, almost frantic, and the poem personifies them lightly: they have a message, and they are determined to deliver it through the night. The night itself is "misty," which softens their glare and makes them feel like small, bright voices in a large, damp space. The mist and the later rain keep the setting soft-edged, so the neon feels slightly unreal, like something floating in the air.
The last stanza breaks the pattern, and that is where the poem becomes more than a catalogue. "Lights turn off" is flat and abrupt, with none of the bounce of the earlier lines. Then comes "Dark again," which is the shortest line in the poem, and "Dark and silent in the rain." Here the rhythm slows, and the repeated word "dark" lands like a door closing. The rhyme of "again" and "rain" gives a feeling of settling, a final soft chord after all the jangling. The phrase "dark again" is worth pausing on: it suggests the darkness was always there, waiting, and the lights were only an interruption. It also adds one more sense to the poem. Where the earlier stanzas were all sight, with their flashing and blinking, this one adds sound, or rather its absence. The signs were shouting, and now there is silence and the sound of rain.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. In about a dozen lines it captures a whole mood: the bright, cheap, hopeful chatter of commerce, and the quiet that follows it. It doesn't scold the lights or celebrate them. It simply notices them, with affection and a faint melancholy, and then lets the dark and the rain have the last word.