Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home.
As the story begins, the day is ending. The loss of the light from the sun that serves to create long shadows is a common symbol for the loss of light from life. The miners are here portrayed in a vivid image that compares them to shadows returning home. This foreshadows, of course, the death of Mr. Bates and how his return home will be in the form of a shadow of the man that was once lived.
Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red.
Just as it is getting dark out as the story commences, as the mystery of Mr. Bates’ tardiness and absence begins to loom larger, it is getting dark inside the house. The darkness of the red caused by the fire starting to burn is resonant of blood: the stuff of life that must course freely in order to keep one living. The fact that the fire is burning out is less figurative: it indicates the carelessness with money that Mr. Bates has toward being a caretaker rather than pub-goer.
Something scuffled in the yard, and she started, though she knew it was only the rats with which the place was overrun.
When the clock strikes eight, the lateness of the hour drives Elizabeth outside. Her husband has not returned and the darkness now envelopes everything. She must rely upon senses other than sight to see. Not only because of the darkness, but because the economic dearth of money spent on lighting her world once the sun sets upon it.
One of the men had knocked off a vase of chrysanthemums. He stared awkwardly, then they set down the stretcher. Elizabeth did not look at her husband. As soon as she could get in the room, she went and picked up the broken vase and the flowers.
The chrysanthemums are obviously the central symbol of the story and the image of the vase in which they are displayed being carelessly but without intention knocked to the floor is their most powerful moment in the sun as well as the point at which their significance as metaphor is transferred to the vase. The shattering of the vase becomes a metaphor for shattering of Elizabeth’s illusions about her marriage. The flowers will soon become nothing more than ugly rotted vegetation, but by then aesthetics in full bloom no longer apply as symbol of anything in her life.
