Do you remember, from your earliest days of education, how you used to select colors from the Crayola box to color inside the lines? Perhaps later, her elementary school teacher, to stimulate her imagination, asked her what a particular color looked, smelled, or tasted like.
Poets also use their colors to trigger their thinking in a similar way. Most of the time, colors can be used as symbols that imply intangibles or concepts.
Here is a short list of the implications of color in poetry during the last few centuries:
green = jealousy, rebirth, money
purple = royalty, culture, fantasy
pink = happiness
brown = earthy qualities
orange = curiosity, wisdom
gray = depression, defeat, monotony, boredom
gold-happiness
red = anger, danger, war, seduction, passion
black = sadness or death
white = purity but also death (implied of shroud)
blue = sadness
Apart from its symbolic and impressionistic use, the application of colors has been added to the visuals of the poems.
“The waves of the sea are green and wet,
But above where they die,
Arise others still vaster,
And those are brown and dry.”
By Robert Frost Sand dunes
The use of colors in poetry goes back a long way in written history. Roman and Greek poets, like poets of other races, used colors for their strong connections with emotions. For example, Homer used the color bronze to imply power, and in Roman poetry certain color combinations, especially purple and gold, hinted at royalty, while red and white signified conquest and other concepts. Only Virgil used more than 500 color words in The Aeneid.
“I myself gave him (Ulysses) a bronze sword and a beautiful purple cloak, double-lined, with a shirt reaching down to his feet, and sent him on board his ship with all the marks of honour.” Of The Odyssey – Book XIX
“And hardly its walls defend the Trojan troops:
The city is full of slaughter and fleets,
With a red deluge, their moats increase.”
Of The Aeneid – Chapter 10
Later, Dante vividly used colors to paint the picture of his Hell in the readers’ imaginations.
“On a yellow bag I saw blue
That he had the face and posture of a lion.
Proceeding then the current of my sight,
Another of them saw me, red as blood,
Show a goose whiter than butter.
And one, that with a blue and gravid sow
Blasoned had his little white bag, “
Of Hell, Canto XVII by Dante Alighieri
Shakespeare has also frequently used colors and also the word color itself by attaching it to other nouns to paint more dramatic word pictures.
“Mr Andrew
Alas, he is strong, and does indifferently well in a
flame-colored broth. Shall we start some reveals?”
From the Twelfth Night – Act 1, Scene III, by William Shakespeare
Over the last couple of centuries, the use of colors in poetry has become more subjective; although, the colors were also applied with their real identities.
“The merry Sphinx arose,
and he stooped no more on the stone;
She melted into a purple cloud,
she silvery in the moon;
She turned into a yellow flame;
She blossomed in red buds;”
By Ralph Waldo Emerson the sphinx
“Veiled as white as snow and dressed as a flame,
She is before you, who has been so long
filled your young heart with passion and affliction.”
Of Divine Comedy by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Within the circuit of this laborious life
Moments of a blue tint come in,”
Of winter memories by Henry David Thoreau
“In winter, in my room,
i met a worm
Pink, straight and warm.”
By Emily Dickinson ‘In winter, in my room,’
So the next time you sit at your desk with your pen or in front of your computer writing poetry, think about using color. Maybe you can add another dimension to your use.