“The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”

“The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” is both a dance tune heard from the Paradise Dance Hall and the cue to Tom’s meditation on lives awaiting change. Its easy promise of a coming dawn contrasts with the music’s nocturnal setting and Tom’s foreboding account of a world moving toward bombardment.

Sound Across the Alley

The song is heard after Tom steps onto the landing to smoke, leaving Amanda alone to look at her husband’s photograph. Its entrance draws attention beyond the apartment: across the alley stands the Paradise Dance Hall, whose open windows and doors let music spill into the spring evenings. The tune belongs to the neighborhood’s audible life, reaching the Wingfields from a place of dancing and social contact while the family remains enclosed in its own troubles.

Tom describes the dance hall through a sequence of images rather than as a simple background. Sometimes its lights go out except for a large glass sphere turning slowly from the ceiling, filtering the dusk into delicate rainbow colors. The orchestra plays a waltz or tango with a slow, sensuous rhythm; couples then move into the alley’s relative privacy and kiss behind ash pits and telephone poles. The glass sphere’s brief rainbows make pleasure visible, but the surrounding gloom keeps it provisional and shadowed.

Tom’s Contrast Between Stasis and Change

Tom calls the dance hall’s pleasures compensation for lives that pass without change or adventure, a description that places his own life among them. Yet he immediately distinguishes the present year from that repetition: adventure and change are imminent, waiting around the corner for the young people. The tune’s expectation of sunrise thus accompanies a double vision—routine pleasure in the alley and the possibility of upheaval beyond it.

That upheaval is not presented as uncomplicated liberation. Tom associates the wider world with the crisis suspended over Berchtesgaden and with Guernica in Spain, while the local scene offers swing music, liquor, dance halls, bars, movies, and sex. He figures that pleasure as a chandelier-like presence hanging in gloom and flooding the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. The image recalls the dance hall’s turning sphere: color and illumination are real, but they are temporary and do not dispel the darkness around them. Tom ends by widening the contrast into a forewarning of bombardments, so the song’s hopeful title sounds against a future he imagines as violent.

Memory, Class, and the Lost South

The song’s scene also sits beside Amanda’s contrasting recollection of her youth in Blue Mountain. She recalls a Sunday when seventeen gentlemen callers arrived, with so many visitors that the household had to borrow folding chairs from the parish house. Among her callers, she says, were prominent young planters and sons of planters from the Mississippi Delta; she recounts their later fortunes, marriages, deaths, and family histories as evidence of the world in which she expected to make a match.

Amanda’s reminiscence gives that lost world its material and social shape. She remembers wearing a yellowed voile dress with a blue silk sash to lead a cotillion, win the Cakewalk at Sunset Hill, and attend the Governor’s Ball in Jackson. Her account of the crowded spring season—parties, rides, picnics, malaria fever, and an obsession with gathering jonquils—culminates in meeting the man who became her husband. But she did not marry a planter: she married a telephone-company worker who fell in love with long-distance travel and left her unsure of where he was. The contrast between her remembered callers and the dance hall’s anonymous couples makes the song’s modern urban setting a counterpoint to her romanticized Southern past.

The Song’s Dramatic Function

Elsewhere, Amanda turns the same contrast into an explicit fear about the family’s future. After Laura cannot face her business course, Amanda asks what life remains if they have abandoned a business career: dependence, in her account, means unmarried women reduced to living on relatives’ reluctant support, confined to little rooms and treated as burdens. She sets this prospect against the possibility that some girls marry. The tune’s language of waiting for a sunrise therefore resonates with a household that wants a change in circumstances but has no assurance of what form it will take.

As a recurring musical and theatrical element, the song connects domestic confinement to a city’s passing pleasures and to a wider historical horizon. The stage gives its promise no simple fulfillment: the rainbow light is fleeting, the remembered courtship world is gone, and Tom’s account turns expectation toward bombardment. Its significance lies in that tension between the wish for a new day and the fragile, deceptive lights by which people endure the night.