Lovely discussion. Lovely little anthology we're compiling here. Thank you, Maryann. I can recall any number of colorful lines from poems in which color is a key supporting player in one way or another, but not the real star of the show:
Nature's first green is gold, (Robert Frost)
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me, (Jenny Joseph)
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. (E.E. Cummings)
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth; (John Keats)
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; (Dylan Thomas)
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils; (William Wordsworth)
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve. (Edward Lear)
This Walter de la Mare poem may be a lesser work than some of the ones excerpted above, but it's certainly all about color:
Silver
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
And then there's this Richard Wilbur:
Green
Tree leaves which, till the growing-season’s done,
Change into wood the powers of the sun,
Take from that radiance only reds and blues.
Green is the color that they cannot use,
And so their rustling myriads are seen
To wear all summer an extraneous green,
A green with no apparent role, unless
To be the symbol of a great largesse
Which has no end, though autumn may revoke
That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.
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