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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The Changing Light” · The Daily Poem

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, November 2nd, 2026.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's poem is by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's called The Changing Light.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'll read it once off for a few comments and read it one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Changing Light.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Changing Light at San Francisco is none of your East Coast light,
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  SPEAKER_00: none of your pearly light of Paris.
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  SPEAKER_00: The light of San Francisco is a sea light,
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  SPEAKER_00: an island light,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the light of fog blanketing the hills,
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  SPEAKER_00: drifting in at night through the golden gate to lie on the city at dawn.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the halcyon late mornings after the fog burns off,
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  SPEAKER_00: And the sun paints white houses with the sea light of Greece,
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  SPEAKER_00: with sharp, clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the veil of light of early evening.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then another scrim when the new night fog floats in.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in that veil of light, the city drifts anchorless upon the ocean.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something appropriate about Ferlinghetti writing about the light of San Francisco.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's the founder of the legendary San Francisco bookstore, City Lights.
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  SPEAKER_00: This poem gives us the entire shape of a day in San Francisco in terms of the light.
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  SPEAKER_00: And even the way that the text is laid out,
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  SPEAKER_00: it descends,
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  SPEAKER_00: it stair steps down across the page from left to right and from top to bottom.
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  SPEAKER_00: Carrying you along towards this kind of setting of the sun.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the lines are sparse.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're spaced out to convey the lightness and maybe even the intangibility
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  SPEAKER_00: of this light he's trying to capture and describe.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then the lines bunch up near the middle of the poem when the fog has burned off
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  SPEAKER_00: and the light is filling the entire field of vision.
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  SPEAKER_00: His language and his description gets thicker and the lines get more concentrated,
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  SPEAKER_00: they get denser.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the veil of evening comes,
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  SPEAKER_00: that in is free veil of evening,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the light again becomes sparser, thinner.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what was a natural light,
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  SPEAKER_00: the sea light of Greece,
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  SPEAKER_00: he calls it,
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  SPEAKER_00: has been replaced by the electric lights of evening,
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  SPEAKER_00: leaving the city wreathed in fog to look like a great lit ship sailing upon the sea.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful sequence of images that he strings together here,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then I think a pretty singular one to end with.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even recently,
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  SPEAKER_00: as its former glory has fallen off considerably,
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  SPEAKER_00: you'll recognize, I think, the city in these descriptions.
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  SPEAKER_00: Here's the poem one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: The changing light at San Francisco is none of your East Coast light,
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  SPEAKER_00: none of your pearly light of Paris.
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  SPEAKER_00: The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the light of fog blanketing the hills,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: drifting in at night through the golden gate to lie on the city at dawn.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then the halcyon late mornings,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: after the fog burns off and the sun paints white houses with the sea light
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: of Greece,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: with sharp, clean shadows, making the town look like it had just been painted.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the wind comes up at four o'clock,
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: sweeping the hills,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: and then the veil of light of early evening,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then another scrim when the new night fog floats in,
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  SPEAKER_00: and in that veil of light the city drifts, anchorless upon the ocean.
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  SPEAKER_00: This has been The Daily Poem.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back tomorrow with more poetry for you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Till then, find us at dailypoempod.substack.com to listen to past episodes of The Daily Poem.
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  SPEAKER_00: Leave your own thoughts and comments or become a supporter of the show.
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  SPEAKER_00: For all of us at Goldberry Studios, I'm Sean Johnson wishing you happy reading