The Speaker

The poem is narrated in the first person; this speaker is the poet, Maggie Nelson, as she chooses to present herself in this work. The poem is an exploration of her psyche in a difficult period of her life, so every image, motif, and theme relates to her experience and identity, and her efforts to make sense of both. For this reason, the poem has frequently been described as memoir.

Besides Nelson’s relationship with herself, two other major relationships stand at the center of the poem: those with the prince of blue and the speaker’s injured friend. The prince of blue, addressed directly as “you” throughout the book, did not instigate Nelson’s capacity for depression nor her love of the color blue, but his desertion does trigger the deep period of depression in which she writes Bluets. This incident has no physical consequences, but...