Colors Passing Through Us
Read 'Colors Passing Through Us' by 'Marge Piercy' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
Colors Passing Through Us by Marge Piercy
Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.
Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.
Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.
Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.
Yellow as a goat's wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.
Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.
Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.
Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors' buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other's arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
Colors Passing Through Us Summary and Analysis
Marge Piercy's poem builds an intimate love lyric out of color after color, each stanza offering a different hue as if the beloved could be known through a painter's palette. The poem begins with purple and moves steadily through red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and finally cobalt, so the progression feels both orderly and expansive. Each color is tied to a cluster of vivid, physical comparisons-flowers, fruit, animals, foods, weather, clothing, and natural scenes-so the beloved is not described directly so much as evoked through the living world that surrounds her.
The poem's central gesture is a kind of offering. The voice speaks directly to the beloved, turning color into a gift, a bouquet, and even a box of crayons placed at her feet. That presents love as creative attention: to praise someone is to notice how they gather the world around them. Yet the poem also carries a quiet tension between abundance and inadequacy. The speaker can only approach the beloved indirectly, through "oblique" praise and images that seem always to overflow their categories. By the ending, color becomes something intimate and almost bodily, passing through the lovers as they lie together, suggesting that love dissolves boundaries and turns perception itself into shared sensation.
Tone in Colors Passing Through Us
Piercy's tone is tender, exuberant, and inventive, as if she cannot stop discovering new ways to honor the beloved. The emotional atmosphere, though, is not merely cheerful; it is lush, intimate, and slightly breathless, with the piling up of images creating a sense of devotion that nearly spills beyond language. By the final stanza, the mood deepens into something hushed and incandescent, where love feels both bodily and cosmic.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Colors Passing Through Us
- Love as creative praise - The poem turns affection into an artistic act, with each color functioning like a brushstroke or offering that tries to honor the beloved through imaginative comparison.
- Embodied desire - Color is repeatedly linked to skin, fruit, flesh, hands, lips, and physical closeness, making love feel sensual, warm, and fully lived in the body.
- Nature as a language of feeling - Flowers, birds, insects, trees, weather, and gardens provide the poem's vocabulary, suggesting that the natural world is the richest medium for expressing emotion.
- Abundance and excess - The long catalogues of images create a sense of richness that can barely be contained, echoing the speaker's attempt to match the beloved's fullness with endless invention.
- Indirectness in intimacy - The speaker admits to giving "oblique" praise, which shows that deep affection is often expressed sideways, through metaphor and implication rather than plain statement.
- Shared transformation - In the final lines, colors pass through both bodies, suggesting that love changes perception and makes two people part of the same flowing experience.
Literary Devices in Colors Passing Through Us
- Cataloging - The poem relies on a long sequence of examples within each color stanza, creating momentum and reinforcing the sense of overflowing abundance.
- Simile - Repeated comparisons using "as" help the poem translate abstract color into concrete sensations and objects the reader can picture.
- Repetition - The repeated color names and recurring sentence patterns create rhythm, unity, and a cumulative intensity that mirrors the poem's affectionate insistence.
- Imagery - The poem is packed with vivid visual, tactile, and even taste-based images, making the beloved feel alive through sensory association.
- Metaphor - The beloved becomes a bouquet, crayons, and a field of colors, so praise itself becomes an act of painting and gifting.
- Enjambment - Lines often run into one another, giving the poem a flowing, continuous motion that suits its theme of color passing through the body.
- Apostrophe - The direct address to the beloved creates intimacy and urgency, as if the poem were spoken privately in real time.
- Synesthesia - The poem blends sight with touch, taste, smell, and bodily sensation, especially in the final image of colors moving through the lovers like fire.
Symbolism in Colors Passing Through Us
- Colors - The colors symbolize the varied, shifting dimensions of love, desire, and perception, showing the beloved as larger than any single description.
- Crayons - The box of new crayons suggests playful creativity, generosity, and the idea that love can be an act of making.
- Flowers - Flowers stand for beauty, freshness, and the repeated renewal of affection throughout the poem.
- Hands - Hands symbolize touch, labor, intimacy, and the physical ways care is given and received.
- Midnight sky - The cobalt sky suggests depth, completion, and the mystery that gathers at the poem's end, when love becomes inward and shared.
Historical Context of Colors Passing Through Us
Marge Piercy writes within a late twentieth-century American poetic tradition that often values accessible language, political awareness, and attention to ordinary life. Her work frequently gives voice to female experience and treats desire, domestic detail, and the body as serious poetic subjects rather than private or lesser concerns. This poem fits that broader context by using everyday objects, food, plants, and animals to build a richly sensual lyric address.
The poem also reflects a wider modern and contemporary interest in free verse, collage-like accumulation, and the crossing of boundaries between the personal and the imagistic. Its attention to women coloring one another with henna and its emphasis on embodiment place it in conversation with feminist poetry that reclaims the textures of female intimacy, creativity, and mutual recognition.
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