[Maryann Corbett]

Well, while we're on brown, I should post the poem I mentioned up above, Rhina Espaillat's "Brown":

Brown of the sparrow hopping where seeds lie,
of the fat woodchuck foraging, and brown
of marsh in April mirroring the sky.
Brown of my mother's eyes, of my still town
in heavy rains, of rust, of nested down
long after flight, of chocolate on chill nights
when I was young, of oak, of pews, of crown
around God's wounded brow by altar lights;
of log in the cold hearth the match ignites
like memory; of dried blood on a sheet;
of names on a long list the stone recites;
brown of the earth that waits, stroking the feet;
brown of late shadows gathering, of loam,
of that first sleep, of rest, of going home.

[Chris O'Carroll]

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for all of those, Chris. I especially love the Wilbur.

I've been struggling a little with that main character/bit player question. Here's Rachel Hadas's "The Golden Road," in which color seems to be incidental but still functions as the cord that ties the whole together.

On a September road I met my son
walking the other way. I had the hill
to climb; he was returning from a run.
xxxxxNo surprises; he
xxxxxknew I was nearby
as he knew I was. But precisely where
our paths might meet was a benign surprise.

The road was rutted, plastered with gold leaf.
Did our eyes, as we neared each other, meet?
More of a full-body recognition:
xxxxxthis tall young stranger
xxxxxstriding silently
around a bend, who paused on seeing me
(however I appeared) and then passed on.

Autumnal radiance thickened
by complications, memory, history--
nothing startling, in my mother's phrase.
xxxxxThe gold road curves.
xxxxxThe living pass the dead.
Old and young acknowledge one another;
then each takes their separate path ahead.

Oh Muse, peel off your dove-gray cardigan.
September, fallen leaves, and cool noon sun:
I rounded a gold curve and saw my son.

[Rick Mullin]

Any mixture of a red, a blue, and a yellow is a gray. Black and white gives you the conventional notion of gray, but that tone can be mixed more luminously with, say, cobalt blue, alizarin crimson, Naples yellow and a little cadmium yellow. Add white, of course. Gray certainly is the most multitudinous color in nature. It leans toward one or another of the primary or secondary colors in almost all cases and really doesn't exist in any pure state. It never really was the new black.

RM

[Mary McLean]

I heard George Szirtes read from a series of poems he wrote about the different colours in his paintbox (he's an artist too). I liked them but can't remember now which collection they are in (if any). Does anyone know?

[Janice D. Soderling]

Maryann, what a fine thread. Very inspiring.

[Maryann Corbett]

Rick, thanks for the observations on gray; let's see whether they persuade my friend Mike Finley.

Mary, is this perhaps one of the Szirtes poems?

"Soil"

Janice, thanks; let's see if we can keep it going.

A little more googling around turns up some color poems by former Spherean Mark Granier, posted on Szirtes' blog.

[Rick Mullin]

Just came across Louis McNeice's "The Closing Album". Has that been mentioned? Grey, grey, grey.

[Gregory Dowling]

Glad to see this thread is still continuing. Thanks for pointing out the MacNeice, Rick. Here are three lines from it:

O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.

Here's another piece of Hecht, this time from "Apprehensions" in Millions of Strange Shadows, describing a New York storm:

A storm was coming up by dark gradations.
But what was curious about this was
That as the sky seemed to be taking on
An ashy blankness, behind which there lay
Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose
Tarnishing now to something more than dusk,
Crepuscular and funerary greys,
The streets became more luminous, the world
Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness.
The brickwork of the house across the street
(A grim, run-down Victorian chateau)
Became distinct and legible; the air,
Full of excited imminence, stood still.
The streetcar tracks gleamed like the paths of snails.
And all of this made me superbly happy,
But most of all a yellow Checker Cab
Parked at the corner. Something in the light
Was making this the yellowest thing on earth.
It was as if Adam, having completed
Naming the animals, had started in
On colours, and had found his primary pigment
Here, in a taxi cab, on Eighty-ninth street.
It was the absolute, parental yellow.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, Gregory, for keeping it going. Yellow Checker cabs! That certainly is the absolute of yellow.

I'm in debt to Luke Stromberg (not a Spherean, I think, but a West Chester alum) for introducing me to this one by Archibald MacLeish, in which color is a player, though not the whole play:

“What Any Lover Learns”

Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone’s
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.

What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s
Refusal of the river, not the river.