Blue is a shade that has captivated us for centuries. As the color of the sea and sky, it inspires a sense of vastness and wonder that few colors can. So it’s no wonder that poets and writers often use it to convey symbolic meaning.
Here’s a look at a few poems, short stories, novels, and plays where blue color symbolism has a major role.
Blue Symbolism in Poetry
Excluding its appearance in the ocean and in the sky, blue shows up relatively rarely in nature. So when it does, it tends to draw the eye. A bright blue butterfly (or a vivid blue flower) is hard to miss!
When blue appears in a poem, it’s also hard to miss — and it usually carries some symbolic meaning, too. Here are four examples of blue color symbolism in poetry.
“Blue” by Laura Villareal (2023)
“Blue” is a poem whose many images come together to create a cohesive subtext. The titular color shows up in the first stanza, where the speaker is talking about wanting to name paint samples when she was young. In the context of the rest of the poem, this detail might seem extraneous at first. However, it involves the speaker looking closely at — and finding meaning in — color. The rest of the poem hinges on this kind of focus.
One of the most striking elements of this poem is the way it deftly moves from image to image. This sequence is especially memorable:
disney paints buildings they want to hide
in bye-bye blue—
the same color as the eyes
of boys who knew how to love me
if only I blended in
with their hands. when I was young,
I painted my room blue hydrangea—
“dare” by the gorillaz played on my indigo radio
Although each mention of the color blue is quite brief, each one contributes significantly. The first one is a reference to a color called “Bye-Bye Blue” used at some Disney theme parks. It’s a shade of blue that makes buildings seem to blend into the background, so Disney uses it to paint auxiliary buildings and other buildings that aren’t part of the theme.
The next blue reference isn’t as direct. The speaker uses the connection of blue with blending in to recall her youth, when the boys her age seemed to only want an impersonal sort of physicality. Just as the blue paint rendered certain buildings unimportant, the boys’ blue eyes saw her as just part of the landscape of their lives — not as an individual person.
In the stanza that follows, we see a shift. The speaker is painting her own space blue. The subtext here might not seem too clear at first, but this image brings the poem full circle. Early on, the speaker notes that painting surfaces blue can dissuade birds from nesting: “it’s said light blue/will keep birds from building—/they believe it’s the sky./but how could anyone not want to live in the sky?”
From this image, we can see that blue is a color associated with flight and sky. So for the speaker, painting her room blue might be a sign that she was eager to (metaphorically) take flight.
The poem’s close beautifully dovetails the two central meanings of blue used here: in her youth, the speaker was often so eager to move out into the world (blue as a symbol for flight) that she overlooked or downplayed some of her life’s important moments (blue as a symbol for blending in/going unnoticed).
“The Blue Scarf” by Amy Lowell (1912)
Based on the name alone, you might think “The Blue Scarf” is a poem focused on descriptive imagery. There certainly is plenty of imagery here, but as is the case with many great poems, there’s also plenty of subtext underneath.
Ostensibly, this poem is a simple one. The speaker comes upon a blue scarf, and the scarf inspires what could be either a memory or a fantasy about the woman who wore it:
Where is she, the woman who wore it? The scent of her lingers and drugs me. A languor, fire-shotted, runs through me, and I crush the scarf down on my face, And gulp in the warmth and the blueness, and my eyes swim in cool-tinted heavens.
The scarf is clearly symbolic of the speaker’s romantic attachment to the woman in question. But as we can see, the fact that the scarf is blue is a critically important part of the poem. Its color is described in significant detail in the poem, and perhaps more importantly, even the title notes that it’s blue.
Why? In a poem that so clearly centers on desire, you’d probably expect a key symbol to be red or orange — or at least another warm color. Instead, the scarf is blue — one of the coolest colors of them all.
The language of the poem suggests that the blue scarf indicates a tinge of sadness — that the speaker’s connection to the woman who wore the scarf is one that will stay imagined. In the first line, the scarf isn’t just described as being any shade of blue. It’s “the blue of high zeniths.” In astronomy, a zenith is the point in the sky that’s directly above an observer. Fittingly, the woman who wore the scarf is someone who isn’t just (metaphorically) far away from the speaker — she’s unreachable.
Despite her fantasies about the woman in question, the speaker seems to understand that fact. When she picks up the scarf, she takes in “the warmth and the blueness.” Her feelings are bittersweet: though there’s a warmth to her feelings for the woman, there’s also a blueness in knowing the two cannot be together.
Toward the end of the poem, another detail makes it clear that the distance doesn’t dampen the speaker’s feelings for the woman. Of the scarf, she notes that “the blue of it is a violent outrage of colour.” It’s a strangely paradoxical way to describe a cool color, but in this poem, it perfectly captures the complex nature of the connection between the speaker and the mysterious woman who wore the blue scarf.
“Fragmentary Blue” by Robert Frost (1923)
Why do we love seeing blue in the natural world? That’s the central question pondered in Robert Frost’s “Fragmentary Blue,” a pithy, two-stanza meditation. The first stanza asks the reader an interesting question:
Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Essentially, the poem’s speaker wants to know why so many people are enthralled by little blue things in nature when there’s a huge blue sky above us. It’s a valid question. For instance, the bird in the picture is an eye-catching one. If he flew by you while you were taking a walk, you’d probably take a moment to appreciate his beauty. However, the color of the bird isn’t necessarily a rare one. On a bright, sunny day, it wouldn’t be unusual to see a sky that’s roughly the same color.
That first stanza holds the key to the poem’s symbolic meaning, at least in part: blue is associated with heaven. The next stanza expounds upon that subtext and offers an explanation for why humans as a whole have such an appreciation for even touches of blue in nature:
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)— Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high, It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Essentially, blue (heaven) is so far above us that it seems out of reach. As a result, seeing those little glimpses of blue in the world gives us a small taste of heaven: “It only gives our wish for blue a whet.”
“The Blue Door” by Ann Lauterbach (2023)
Some poems have a clear subtext and symbolism that’s easy to detect. Others do not. Ann Lauterbach’s otherworldly poem “The Blue Door” is of the latter type. If you read it and found yourself puzzling over its meaning, there’s no need to question your literary analysis skills — Lauterbach herself has said that her poems deliberately avoid “the logic of cause and effect.”
“The Blue Door” has a dazzling lineup of vivid images that make it worth reading in its entirety. However, the primary blue symbolism is found in the final stanza. In this stanza’s first few lines, the speaker asks herself if writing poems is just a way to delay life’s mundane tasks. As it continues, the stanza opens up to a striking lineup of images:
Words are like small magnets, pulling other words toward them, one by one, so the singles gather and as they gather they attest to an alignment that will become meaning. What was it you said about naming? It makes a way between unbeing and being, the definite flowing into the circulating infinite, the blue door opening the night sky.
Through the association of words with magnets, we see that for the speaker, poetry is a way to take the chaos of everyday life and make it meaningful. Naming things (much like putting things into words through poetry) “makes a way between unbeing and being,” so we see that the speaker also sees writing as a way to give life to thoughts and ideas.
Then we come to the final image. Generally speaking, if an image appears at the end of a poem (and especially if it appears in the final line), it’s particularly important to that poem. To the speaker, naming (or writing) things opens the titular blue door to the metaphorical night sky.
But what does this door mean? And why is it blue? The key lies in the penultimate line. To the speaker, the act of writing forms a connection to the “circulating infinite.” The circulating infinite might be human consciousness, the world at large, the divine, the spirit of the universe — whatever vast, unending entity you see extending beyond everyday life.
Blue is a color that has long been associated with the heavens, so it makes sense that both the door (the gateway to that circulating infinite) and the night sky (the circulating infinite itself) appear in this celestial shade. “The Blue Door” might be a poem that escapes complete understanding, but it invites you to take a moment and step into that infinite vastness.
Blue Symbolism in Prose
Blue is a color that pops up in poems quite often, but its symbolic utility doesn’t end there. This cool shade is also an effective symbol in short stories, novels, and other kinds of prose. Below are four examples of blue color symbolism in the world of prose.
“Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace (1991)
From its first few sentences, “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace captures the imagination. That might be partially because of the way it’s written. Many stories are told in the first person or the third person, but it’s very rare to see one told in the second person as this one is. The use of “you” creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy with the reader.
“Forever Overhead” is also a story that packs a huge amount of imagery into relatively few pages. You could write almost endlessly about the images and symbolism used here, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on the color blue and how it furthers the message of the story.
The story centers around a boy who is turning 13 and has come to the local pool with his family to celebrate. At the very beginning of the story — before we see the pool — we learn that the boy’s voice and body have been changing as he becomes an adult. You could view the boy’s stepping into the pool as his approaching manhood. In that sense, blue becomes a symbol of maturity, or of the unknown world of adult life.
This reading is supported by the very first part of the story. In the first paragraph, the narrator describes the boy’s thirteenth birthday as “Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.”
The pool proves to be an effective symbol of the chaos of the world beyond childhood:
The pool is a system of movement. Here now there are: laps, splash fights, dives, corner tag, cannonballs, Sharks and Minnows, high fallings, Marco Polo (your sister still It, halfway to tears, too long to be It, the game teetering on the edge of cruelty, not your business to save or embarrass). Two clean little bright-white boys caped in cotton towels run along the poolside until the guard stops them dead with a shout through his bullhorn. The guard is brown as a tree, blond hair in a vertical line on his stomach, his head in a jungle explorer hat, his nose a white triangle of cream. A girl has an arm around a leg of his little tower. He’s bored.
This isn’t the strongest instance of blue color symbolism in the story. However, it kicks off a blue motif that is central to the story’s meaning. In this instance, the blue symbolism makes adulthood seem like a largely positive (albeit chaotic) experience.
The next time blue appears, it briefly touches on the pain that comes with adulthood. The boy is in line to jump off the diving board when he notices the legs of the woman ahead of him:
The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. Her legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin, as if something were broken, hurt, in her legs. Her legs look like they hurt to be squeezed, full of curled Arabic lines of cold broken blue. Her legs make you feel like your own legs hurt.
The cheese comparison makes this image a particularly vivid one, and the “lines of cold broken blue” suggest that adulthood isn’t always bright and bustling like the great blue pool. In a sense, the varicose veins described here are foreshadowing the most powerful color symbolism of all: the deep blue of the pool that the boy sees from high up on the diving board.
Right after he takes note of the woman’s painful-looking legs, the boy begins to notice how painful the rungs of the ladder are as he climbs up to the diving board. It’s another nod to the kind of pain that so often comes with adulthood.
Ultimately, toward the end of the story, the symbolic meaning of the blue pool becomes clearer than ever:
The square tank is a cold blue sheet. Cold is just a kind of hard. A kind of blind. You have been taken off guard. Happy Birthday.
For any child going through puberty, the specter of adulthood is a scary one — in a sense, being on the brink of adulthood is like the wave of apprehension you get before plunging into chilly water. And what better symbol is there for that kind of coldness and worry than the color blue?
“The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams (1944)
“The Glass Menagerie”, a 1944 play, is one of the most famous works by Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. It features the dysfunctional Wingfield family: mother Amanda wistfully remembers her days as a debutante in the South, son Tom seeks escape from his monotonous family life by going to the movies, and anxious, crippled daughter Laura hides from the world with her “glass menagerie,” a collection of small glass animals.
As you might have already guessed from the title, the glass animal collection is one of the most important symbols in the play. But there’s another unique symbol that’s worth exploring: blue roses.
That symbol comes from a nickname given to Laura in her high school days. Jim O’Connor, the popular boy Laura had a crush on, started calling her “Blue Roses” after he misunderstood a medical diagnosis:
When I had that attack of pleurosis — he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis — he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that’s what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he’d holler, “Hello, Blue Roses!”
If you’ve ever read the text of the play, you might remember that Tennessee Williams included a “screen device.” Periodically, the stage directions note that an image, symbol, or phrase should be projected onto the screen. Not all live versions of the play include these images, but they’re a great way to let the audience know that a given detail is important.
Throughout The Glass Menagerie, the image of blue roses appears on the screen multiple times — a clear sign that this is an important symbol. But why use roses as a symbol? And why make them blue?
Simply put, blue roses are beautifully unique and fragile — just like Laura. Laura is anxious, reclusive, and easily overwhelmed, so she spends her days at home with her collection of glass animals. Her mother tries to help her start a career by enrolling her in typing classes, but she eventually discovers that Laura dropped out after a few days.
When Laura’s (former) teacher tells Amanda why Laura left, we get some insight into her emotional fragility:
I remember her perfectly now. Her hands shook so that she couldn’t hit the right keys! The first time we gave a speed-test, she broke down completely — was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash-room! After that morning she never showed up any more.
Many of Laura’s defining characteristics — her physical deformity, her emotional difficulties when navigating the world, and her general reclusiveness — don’t generally have positive associations. But the nickname “Blue Roses” takes those qualities and gives them an air of mystique and intrigue. After all, blue roses don’t exist in the natural world.
When creating this critical symbol, Tennessee Williams could have easily chosen another color of rose that doesn’t usually happen in nature (like gold, silver, or orange). But blue’s association with sadness makes it the most appropriate color to use here. There’s nothing sad about being unique, but Laura’s isolation (and arguably, her fear of the world beyond the Wingfield home) makes her seem like a delicate, pitiable being incompatible with the real world — much like a blue rose.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood (1985)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is one of Margaret Atwood’s most famous works. It enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in 2017, when a TV show based on the book was released straight to the Hulu platform. The book is set in the future, when the United States has been transformed into Gilead, a totalitarian state essentially governed by an extremist reading of the Bible.
Because of extensive pesticide use and an increasingly radioactive environment, many women are infertile. There is a class of “handmaids,” or women forced to bear children for high-ranking officials, to ensure the nation has a steady birthrate. In Gilead, women are divided into rigid social classes, and each class has a particular color of dress. Handmaids wear red, “aunts” (those in charge of training handmaids) wear gray-brown, “Marthas” (those in charge of running a household) wear dull green, and the wives of top-ranking officials wear various shades of blue.
In a novel, when there’s such a focus on color, you can be certain that there’s deliberate symbolism behind the choices. And when it comes to blue, there’s a particularly rich, multilayered symbolism worth exploring.
One of the clearer subtexts behind the blue is the association with nobility or royalty. If you’re even a casual researcher of color symbolism, you know that in many societies, the color purple was once associated with the ruling and/or wealthy classes, largely because purple dye was expensive and difficult to produce. However, many people don’t realize that in several societies, the color blue was associated with the upper class for the same reason.
For example, blue was a rare and expensive color in medieval Europe and ancient Egypt. In Europe, the color usually came from a plant called woad (Isatis tinctoria). In Egypt, these pigments were made from grinding up lapis lazuli (or sometimes other blue stones like azurite or cobalt).
In both cases, the process of obtaining the ingredients was logistically complex. The woad plant is native to the Mediterranean, and the Egyptians primarily used lapis lazuli brought in from Afghanistan. Turning raw material into blue involved multi-step, laborious processes.
Essentially, while The Handmaid’s Tale is fictionalized, there’s a very real historical reason the wives wear blue. But that’s not the only subtext behind this artistic choice. Some readers of the book (and/or avid watchers of the TV series) think the shades of blue the wives wear are a somewhat ironic nod to the Virgin Mary. Mary is often shown as wearing blue robes, but unlike the wives in Gilead, she is both fertile and nurturing.
As you might have guessed, the wives’ blue garb is also symbolic of sadness. You might think that compared to other women in Gilead, the wives of higher-ranking officials have better lives. That might be true, but their lives are far from happy. Because the society is so focused on procreation, the women’s husbands rarely show them any affection. And because they, like their husbands, are highly visible in their communities, they have very little freedom. Women who are lower on the social hierarchy have enough invisibility to have affairs or otherwise break the rules in certain ways. The wives of the officials don’t.
To underscore the symbolism of those blue robes, Atwood symbolically uses blue elsewhere in the book, too. As a cool color, blue captures the coldness many of the officers’ wives exhibit toward the handmaids. When Offred, the narrator, talks about meeting Serena Joy, the woman whose husband she’s been assigned to, she focuses on Serena Joy’s icy blue eyes:
Her eyebrows were plucked into thin arched lines, which gave her a permanent look of surprise, or outrage, or inquisitiveness, such as you might see on a startled child, but below them her eyelids were tired-looking. Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out.
It’s a beautiful description, but the “hostile blue” makes it abundantly clear: Serena Joy’s hostility toward Offred isn’t just an interpersonal conflict. Rather, it’s indicative of a broader trend of the acrimony between social classes in this stratified society.
“The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton (1967)
“The Outsiders” is a remarkable novel. It’s made even more remarkable by the fact that the author started writing it at the age of 15. She was 18 when it was published. The Outsiders focuses on two rival gangs in Oklahoma: the lower-class Greasers and the higher-class Socials (“Socs”), and it’s ultimately a coming-of-age novel about Ponyboy Curtis, a 14-year-old high school student and a member of the Greasers.
The color blue is used as a symbol in The Outsiders, and there’s some overlap with the way it’s used in The Handmaid’s Tale. Early on in the novel, we see blue eyes used to indicate that someone is different from Ponyboy. Ponyboy is much different from his brother Darry, and that’s reflected in his description of Darry’s eyes:
He’s got eyes that are like two pieces of pale blue-green ice. They’ve got a determined set to them, like the rest of him. He looks older than twenty— tough, cool, and smart. He would be real handsome if his eyes weren’t so cold.
Between the cold color and the vivid description of the expression in Darry’s eyes, it’s easy to see how Ponyboy feels so markedly different from his own brother.
However, while blue eyes are used this way a few times in the book, blue eyes also are not the primary blue symbol here. The main blue symbol is arguably the blue Mustang, the car that the Socs drive around. In this instance, the symbolic meaning of the color blue is almost identical to how it’s used above. There is (obviously) a coldness and a tension between the Greasers and Socs. Every time the Socs drive by, the car serves as a physical barrier between the two groups, and the color blue serves as a symbolic barrier.
Most People Like Blue
Blue is the world’s most popular color, so it’s not surprising that so many writers choose to use it symbolically. And no matter if you love blue, hate it, or don’t have strong feelings either way, you just might spot it the next time you start a new book or pick up an old favorite.
Of course, that’s not to say you should view poems, stories, and novels as collections of symbols to be decoded. That type of oversimplified view takes away from the rich layers of meaning you’re sure to find. Color symbolism isn’t the only source of meaning in a piece of literature, but it can certainly enrich your understanding.
Continue exploring and discover what all the other colors mean in literature.
