The poem uses images of light and darkness in counterintuitive ways: the darkness represents safety and freedom, while light represents the oppressive, conventional society. This is most overt in the first stanza, when the speaker says they are “braver at night” (Line 2). By contrast, the houses she flies over, symbolic of the conventional humanity within, are characterized as “light by light” (Line 4). In the third stanza, the speaker observes the “last bright routes” (Line 17) as she is taken to her death by fire — the manifestation of a totalitarian, conservative light used to literally and figuratively burn away that which does not belong.