Gray is a color that’s sometimes dismissed as being dull or boring. However, when you look closely, there’s a whole rainbow of gray shades out there. Some are shades of “true” gray, meaning they’re blends of pure black and pure white. Others incorporate hints of even bright colors to form warm-leaning or cool-leaning shades.
Gray has a number of different symbolic meanings — it can stand for ambiguity, refinement, authority, conservatism, neutrality, and more. Because it can represent so many things, gray is a color that can enrich any piece of literature. Here’s a look at some examples of gray color symbolism in poetry and prose.
Gray Symbolism in Poetry
Color symbolism pops up in every genre of literature. However, poetry is probably the genre best known for the use of symbolism and other kinds of figurative language. Sometimes, a brief image is enough to shape the poem’s meaning. At other times, the color may be an overarching presence that stays in focus throughout. The poems below incorporate gray to varying extents, but all have one thing in common: when it comes to establishing meaning through subtext, gray plays a key role.
“Glossolalia” by Eugenia Leigh (2022)
“Glossolalia” is a brief but captivating poem. The word “glossolalia” means “speaking in tongues,” which is a practice associated with some religions. When someone speaks in tongues, they make sounds or speak unfamiliar words. Believers think that speakers are pronouncing words in languages they don’t speak. Many religious traditions that embrace glossolalia believe that the words are part of “divine” languages and not any languages spoken by humans.
In the poem, the speaker’s son is not literally speaking in tongues. However, for a young child, learning new words is a lot like learning a new language. As a result, the speaker’s son repeats words — in this case, it’s “knife” and “blue” — without fully understanding what they mean.
The color gray comes into play when the son notices clouds in the sky:
The bells, blue, the car, the cup,
the light. I marvel at my son,
who marvels at the sky—blue, blue—
no matter how gray the bully of clouds.
And this is all I want.
Look at my son laughing at the rain.
Look how he prods the window
with his knife, insisting
we cut up the storm, demanding
the blue back into view.
Many children (and especially children in literature) seem to have an uncanny kind of wisdom. It’s a common trope, but in this instance, the poet incorporates it subtly enough that it doesn’t seem trite. We see the subtext in the child’s actions: when he’s faced with a gray “bully of clouds,” he manages to both see the slivers of blue in the sky and aim to bring them back into view. Gray is often associated with storms, and in this poem, literal storm clouds serve as symbols of figurative storms — seemingly insurmountable challenges, grief, illness, or anything else that makes the world seem a little darker. The speaker’s little son is the essence of hope itself, and when you picture a bright-eyed child facing off against the gigantic specter of a looming storm, it’s hard to not feel at least a little more optimistic about what the future holds.
“The Gray Heron” by Galway Kinnell (2017)
Gray might seem like a very nondescript color for a bird. However, if you’ve ever seen the muted, pewter-like hue of a grey heron, you know that these birds are far more magnificent than their name implies. Galway Kinnell’s “The Gray Heron” offers readers a glimpse of the natural world. More specifically, it closely examines the relationship between the observed (nature) and the observer (humans).
In many pieces of writing, gray is a symbol of uncertainty or a blurring of lines. Often, when we think of exploring the natural world, we create a clear boundary: we see ourselves as something separate from the rest of nature. “The Gray Heron” reminds us that observation goes two ways — animals in the natural world watch us just like we watch them. Just as black and white combine to create gray, the human world and the natural world overlap to create meaningful, even surreal interactions, like the one in the poem.
The speaker in “The Gray Heron” tries to follow the titular bird, but he instead encounters a large lizard that watches him intently:
I could find where I was
expecting to see the bird
was a three-foot-long lizard
in ill-fitting skin
and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper
of the mineral kingdom.
It stopped and tilted its head,
which was much like
a fieldstone with an eye
in it, which was watching me
to see if I would go
or change into something else.
The word “gray” is not specifically used to describe the lizard. However, if you’ve ever seen a fieldstone, you know that they are nearly always gray. The lizard’s head is vividly described as being like “a fieldstone with an eye/in it.” This particular image is especially appropriate. “The Gray Heron” is a poem that deals with observation and the idea that while we’re observing the natural world, that world is watching us, too. Many people don’t think about animals in the wild noticing them — and they really don’t think about rocks or other inanimate objects watching them.
To the speaker, the lizard is rock-like: it is both part of “the mineral kingdom” and has a head that looks like a fieldstone. It’s also not what the speaker had hoped to see. But there’s another unexpected element in this strange encounter. Like some lizards, the one described above has a nearly prehistoric appearance.
Once you get a sense of the poem’s complexity, you can appreciate the several symbolic meanings of gray: (1) the momentary overlap of the human world with the natural world, (2) the uncertainty and ambiguity of nature — the speaker is certain he will see a heron, but he instead sees the lizard, and (3) the connection of past and present.
“Aubade With Horses (Fort Worth Impromptu II)” by Mark Wagenaar (2018)
“Aubade With Horses (Fort Worth Impromptu II)” is a poem that draws you in right away. An aubade is a poem about the dawn or the morning, so the fact that it opens with a mention of death and ashes is immediately noticeable:
There’s no right word for the color of the ashes,
you said at the New Orleans hospice—
every week a new urn carried out
& poured into the nameless garden.
The poem centers on this specific yet unknown color. Through imagery that manages to be both grounded in the physical world and full of the emotional subtext that drives the poem, the speaker evokes the sense of uncertainty we all have surrounding death. He names a few approximations of the color, and as you may guess from the title, some of these approximations involve horses:
And maybe,
just there through the fog,
this morning’s mare & her foal,
dapple-gray & steaming,
come close enough.
Or the grime-dulled silver of the quarter you were given once
to dig a horse’s grave—
a piano’s worth of hand-thrown earth,
when you were young, first of many.
In this poem, gray primarily symbolizes the unknown. Figuratively speaking, someone who sees the world in black and white is able to take in their surroundings objectively (or they at least think they’re able to). Gray is a combination of black and white, so it captures the kind of murky inexactness that surrounds the little-known facets of life.
In the case of this poem, the little-known facet is what happens after death. That makes some of the images the speaker uses somewhat surprising. He guesses that a foal in the morning fog — arguably a strong symbol of new life and new beginnings — might be the exact color of gray the unnamed “you” mentions. The next image is closer to being a symbol of death, as it shows us a dull, grimy quarter offered as payment for digging a grave. Ultimately, like the thing itself, Wagenaar’s imagining of the color of ashes (and the exact nature of death) remains a mystery.
“American Pharoah” by Ada Limón (2015)
If you follow the sport of horse racing at all, American Pharoah (his registered name includes the misspelling of “pharaoh”) might be a familiar name. He won the Triple Crown — a three-race series including the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes — in 2015, and he was the first horse to do so in 37 years. He also was only the 12th horse in history to do so.
All that is to say that the titular horse in “American Pharoah” is a big deal — and that’s something you need to understand to grasp the full weight of this poem. At the poem’s opening, the speaker is on her way to see the colt train. She’s been talked into it by another person in the poem. The color gray appears in the first line, and it isn’t hard to see that the weather and the color of the sky are in line with the speaker’s current outlook on life:
Despite the morning’s gray static of rain,
we drive to Churchill Downs at 6 a.m.,
eyes still swollen shut with sleep. I say,
Remember when I used to think everything
was getting better and better? Now, I think
it’s just getting worse and worse. I know it’s not
what I’m supposed to say as we machine our
way through the silent seventy minutes on 64
over pavement still fractured from the winter’s
wreckage. I’m tired. I’ve had vertigo for five
months and on my first day home, he’s shaken
me awake to see this horse, not even race, but
work.
The “gray static” sets the tone for the rest of the poem, and especially for the speaker’s mood at the outset. In the first couple of lines, it looks like the speaker may just be sleepy, but we soon see that there is a sense of worsening issues. We can’t tell whether she’s referring to problems in her relationship, mental or physical health issues, problems with her finances or career, or something else. However, given the strength of the statement — it’s not just a few elements of her life that the speaker sees getting worse, but all of it — we don’t need to know.
Despite her reluctance, the speaker comes along to watch American Pharoah. We don’t see the color gray mentioned again, but it’s alluded to later. As soon as the horse launches into his workout, there’s a shift in both the weather and the speaker’s mood:
Then, the horse with his misspelled name comes out,
first just casually cantering with his lead horse,
and next, a brief break in the storm, and he’s racing
against no one but himself and the official clocker,
monstrously fast and head down so we can see
that faded star flash on his forehead like this
is real gladness.
“A brief break in the storm” is our first hint that the poem is about to turn. If you’ve ever seen a talented racehorse in action, you know how inspirational it can be to watch it extend into full stride. Then, as she watches American Pharoah run, the speaker slowly starts to emerge from the gloom that permeates the first part of the poem. Instead of a storm or a gray rainy sky, the predominant image is now a flash of light from the tiny star on the horse’s forehead, and the speaker says that “this/is real gladness.”
By the poem’s conclusion, the figurative gray storm seems to have disappeared. And just like the horse racing expert who decides American Pharoah has a chance of winning the Triple Crown after all, the speaker has a hopeful thought: “I want to take it all back.”
Gray Symbolism in Prose
Generally speaking, fiction writers have a lot more page space to incorporate color symbols than poets do. It’s not uncommon to come across a novel using gray (or another color) as a prominent motif, but some works of fiction still get a lot of symbolic mileage out of a few mentions of a color — and both strategies can greatly enrich your experience as a reader. Here’s a look at two novels and two stories where gray plays a major role.
“Gray Matter” by Stephen King (1973)
Stephen King is famous for his works of horror fiction. His novels and short stories often include elements of the supernatural, and “Gray Matter” is no exception. However, this short story stands out because much of the horror comes from the fact that the imagery — visual, auditory, and olfactory — is so incredibly revolting.
The story’s title might make you think that it centers around the gray matter in the brain. However, the “gray matter” in question is something much more bizarre. The story starts out ordinarily enough: the narrator, an older man, is gathered with his similarly aged group of friends in Henry’s Nite-Owl, a 24-hour convenience store in Bangor, Maine. Suddenly, Timmy Grenadine, a boy who regularly comes in to buy his father, Richie, some beer, comes in looking deeply disturbed. He usually purchases the beer and leaves, but this time, something is wrong:
‘Mr Parmalee,’ he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling around in his head like ball bearings, ‘you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can’t stand to go back there. I’m scared.’
Out of earshot of the others, Timmy tells Henry what’s happened. The narrator and his friends want to know, but Henry says he’d rather wait to tell them until they’re on their way to Richie’s. However, we get our first glimpse of the strange sight that’s waiting for them:
‘No,’ Henry said. ‘I’d just as soon not say anything just yet. It’d sound crazy. I will show you somethin-‘, though. The money Timmy had to pay for the beer with.’ He shed four dollar bills out of his pocket, holding them by the corner, and I don’t blame him. They was all covered with a grey, slimy stuff that looked like the scum on top of bad preserves.
We learn that ever since Richie drank a bad can of beer, he’s been morphing slowly into something unrecognizable. Like a human fungus, he starts to demand the lights be kept off and insists on drinking warm beer. Gradually, he turns into an amorphous, slimy gray lump that barely looks human, and he even eats a putrefied dead cat. Three people have gone missing recently, and he’s suspected of being responsible for their deaths as well.
Much like the group in the story, we get a good sense of what’s happened to Richie, but it can’t possibly prepare us for the truly grotesque sight of him:
What we saw in that one or two seconds will last me a lifetime – or whatever’s left of it. It was like a huge grey wave of jelly, jelly that looked like a man, and leaving a trail of slime behind it.
But that wasn’t the worst. Its eyes were flat and yellow and wild, with no human soul in ’em. Only there wasn’t two. There were four, an’ right down the centre of the thing, betwixt the two pairs of eyes, was a white, fibrous line with a kind of pulsing pink flesh showing through like a slit in a hog’s belly.
It was dividing, you see. Dividing in two.
The picture is horribly vivid, but it might be different if the man-blob were purple, green, or orange. Gray can be a symbol of decay, and in this particular story, it clearly is. Richie is a person who has been figuratively decaying for a long time. We learn early in the story that while he has always loved to drink, he was able to keep things more or less together when he was working at a sawmill. He was given lifelong disability pay, and since then, he mostly sits in front of the TV and drinks case after case of cheap beer. He is also enormously overweight: the narrator describes him as being “a fat man with jowls like pork butts and ham-hock arms.” Richie used to come to the Nite-Owl with the other men, but he hasn’t been in for some time.
Even if he hadn’t turned into the supernatural blob in the story, Richie himself would still be a symbol of decay. The scope of his life has narrowed, he has virtually no social connections (he even largely ignores his son), his physical health is poor, and he has descended into alcohol abuse. Although you won’t turn into a slimy gray blob if your life takes a similar course, Richie still serves as a sad (and scary) cautionary tale.
“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 and was made into a movie in 2009. If you’ve read the book, seen the movie, or both, you know that the story itself is incredibly bleak. It comes as no surprise that gray is a color that appears quite often. From the novel’s outset, gray shows up repeatedly, often in the surrounding environment. It’s symbolic of the characters’ emotional states, but it also serves the practical purpose of illustrating the setting. The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and while the details of the apocalypse are not revealed, we can see that the aftermath is a dark landscape covered in ash:
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land.
That kind of dead, shadowy, hopeless landscape permeates the novel. Even sunrises, which are typically symbolic of new beginnings, are bleak: the narrator mentions “the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns.” References to the color are distributed throughout the text, but not so much that it seems unnatural. This is a key part of keeping the ambiance — both literal and symbolic — at the front of the reader’s mind. If The Road were a short story, a couple of mentions of the color might be enough to establish the setting. However, the novel is nearly 300 pages, and just as a movie incorporates multiple shots of a setting, The Road regularly intersperses brief descriptions (and especially descriptions of the landscape’s general grayness) to keep the reader grounded.
It would be easy to slide into using cliche images when describing a gray landscape. But the strikingly beautiful language McCarthy uses throughout is one of The Road‘s best features, and many of the gray images are one-of-a-kind: “The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition,” “He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break,” “The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing,” “Small pleasureboats half sunken in the gray water,” “The windows giving back the gray and nameless day,” and “another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands” are some of the most memorable. Along with the vivid language, the plentiful gray color symbolism paints a clear picture of a post-apocalyptic land no one hopes to ever traverse.
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury (1951)
Some of the world’s most impactful short stories seem extraordinarily simple — and to a disengaged, unimaginative, or inexperienced writer, they may seem to be about nothing at all. However, in the hands of a capable writer, a seemingly simple story can become rife with incredible subtext. That’s the case with “The Pedestrian,” a 1951 short story that at first seems to just be about a man who has a brief encounter with the police while walking.
The setting of “The Pedestrian” is gray and bleak like that of The Road, although the bleakness isn’t quite as pronounced. The story is set in 2053 (and because it was written in 1951, that year seemed considerably further into the future than it does today). Civilization still exists, but the fact that everyone is inside watching television at night makes main character Leonard Meade’s nightly walks feel like strolls through a post-apocalyptic landscape:
To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.
The color gray is not explicitly mentioned in this initial setup. However, the picture we get is bleak enough that it may as well be. Many of the images — including the concrete sidewalk, moonlit streets, and frosty air — are often gray as well.
Later, we see gray featured prominently as we discover just how much the obsession with television has caused the imaginary society to decay:
Magazines and books didn’t sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.
The color is briefly mentioned two other times in the piece. In the beginning, Leonard notices the specter-like presence of his neighbors through their windows as he walks: “Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.” And later on, when Leonard is talking to the police, we see that “the moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were gray and silent.”
Gray plays a critical symbolic role in the story — it symbolizes the figurative death and decay that can emerge when new technologies spread unchecked. Some people believe that “The Pedestrian” was almost prophetic — that it comes close to capturing the effects modern technology has had on our society. There are certainly some parallels: you might argue that technology has led to isolation and a loss of human connection. However, the imagined world of the story is remarkably different — in “The Pedestrian,” the cultural fascination with technology has led to a near absence of crime, but in our current world, technology has opened up a host of new ways to commit crime. Each world is figuratively gray in its own way.
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde (1890)
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is one of those books that seems to have earned a place in popular consciousness. Even if you’ve never read it, you probably have at least a basic familiarity with this iconic piece of Gothic fiction: it’s a story of a man who remains handsome and youthful while a portrait of him ages instead.
At the novel’s outset, an artist named Basil Hallward — who sees Dorian as a muse and may have romantic feelings for him — paints a striking portrait of him. The portrait catches the eye of Lord Henry Wotton, a nobleman who believes beauty and pleasure are the only things in life worth pursuing, and under his influence, Dorian begins to feel the same way. He wishes that he could remain youthful and beautiful as his portrait shows the signs of age instead. His wish is granted, and Dorian begins an 18-year journey into nearly every vice. It’s a journey that destroys many lives, and ultimately, it destroys Dorian’s life as well.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, gray color symbolism comes into play through Dorian Gray’s name — not necessarily through color imagery. The color gray can symbolize moral ambiguity or even corruption, and toward the end of the novel (when the reality of Dorian’s life starts to settle in), we start to see that even the main character’s name underscores how his innocence has been sullied:
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood—his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?
Gray also has another symbolic meaning here: old age. Although the years continue to pass, Dorian doesn’t appear to age — it’s the portrait that looks more sallow and haggard by the day. However, when Dorian destroys the portrait, there’s nothing left to bear the marks of his transgressions for him anymore. When he’s found dead by a footman and a coachman, he has the body of a decrepit old man, and the portrait is beautiful once again:
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
As you might expect from a Gothic novel, Dorian is not able to simply reverse the havoc he’s unleashed on his life. The color symbolism here might be straightforward, but The Picture of Dorian Gray is a nuanced cautionary tale of the dangers of devoting oneself purely to hedonism.
Find New Meaning in the Shadows of Your Favorite Pieces
Gray might not seem like the most exciting color, but thanks to its rich symbolic meaning, it can add whole new dimensions to pieces of literature across genres. Whether you’re reading a novel that seems to be cloaked in gray, discovering a poem with just a few gray touches, or anything in between, you’ll be amazed to find out just how much a single shade can enrich your reading experience.
Continue exploring and discover what all the other colors mean in literature.
