Color

One of the key images in the poem is color. In a text where very little is clear — indeed, where the entire text is only about two hundred words long — one thing that anchors the narrative is the repeated use of color as imagery. In the poem’s 31 lines, five of them contain the name of a color. Those colors are, in the order in which they appear in the poem: blue, brown, black, white, and red.

It is likely that these colors have individual symbolic meaning, as proposed in another section of this guide. As such, they can be read as a sort of rainbow of symbolism, able to be drawn upon by the author to bring up a variety of symbolically important meanings, from desire to purity to new beginnings. These meanings are many and layered, and they are central to the structure of...