What does yellow stand for? You might say it represents joy, warmth, energy, or happiness. It often does, but yellow’s symbolic meaning is richer and much more nuanced than that. It can represent hope, optimism, and new beginnings — but it can also symbolize stagnation, decay, death, and even cowardice.
As is the case with most colors, if you spot yellow in a piece of poetry or prose, it’s almost certainly there on purpose. Let’s take a closer look at how yellow is used symbolically in both poetry and prose.
Yellow Symbolism in Poetry
Poetry is a genre where word economy is particularly important. Each detail is carefully placed — and that includes details about color. The following poems feature the color yellow as more than just a mention — the color helps shape the meanings of the poems themselves.
“Yellow Glove” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
At first glance, “Yellow Glove” might look like a very short story — it has no definite line breaks. However, it’s more properly referred to as a prose poem. And as is the case with most prose poems, there’s a lot of meaning packed into a very small space.
To really understand the power of yellow’s symbolism here, you need to understand the context of the speaker’s life. The speaker is a young girl, and it’s clear that her family is poor (“We didn’t have much.”). The first part of the poem echoes this meager existence. Much of it shows us how the speaker’s life is one filled with caution and restriction:
Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.
There’s so much focus on what not to do that there’s no time to focus on beauty (or even on any imagery at all). Even though the above passage shows us the moment the speaker receives the yellow gloves — the focus of the poem — the only adjectives used to describe them are “new” and “yellow.” The speaker is more concerned with the possibility of losing them.
Even though the gloves aren’t extensively described here, yellow is still symbolic: it’s a bright spot amidst the stress and instability of poverty. And then the speaker loses one of the gloves. She doesn’t want to upset her mother, so she simply hides one of her hands in her pocket. Life goes on, and then, three months after the glove was lost, the speaker finds it.
Suddenly, there’s a burst of hopeful energy that hadn’t been there before:
There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos? Part of the difference between floating and going down.
Note that yellow appears twice here. The yellow light brings a sense of warmth and joy to the ordinary happening of children walking home, and the yellow glove has of course returned to our speaker.
This powerful final section of the poem is united by a common theme — there’s a sense of things coming full circle. Children leave their homes and safely return, trees lose their leaves only to be “reborn,” and the speaker’s glove vanishes and then returns to her.
In the final line, the speaker outlines the subtext of the glove’s return. To her, the near-miraculous event is “part of the difference between floating and going down.” Essentially, the yellow glove is a symbol of resilience — of the speaker’s ability to rise above and persevere despite the challenges she and her family face.
“Yellow” by John Hollander (1977)
This poem’s simple title is especially fitting — from the start, “Yellow” captures the burst of new yellow blooms that arrive as winter fades away. The appearance of jonquils, forsythias, and other flowers isn’t just a natural progression from winter. Instead, it’s the emergence of something rare and treasured from a cover of heavy gloom: the first line characterizes yellow as “dirty gold sublimed from the black earth.”
That image, while beautifully evocative, doesn’t give us a clear sense of what yellow is symbolizing here. The next stanza gives us a clue:
Like gold afire in the yellow candles' Flame, steady with remembrances and now And then only wavering in regret, What might have been burns up and the bright fruit Of what we after all have ever ripens. The squinting flames eye each other as fruit And flame and eye and yellowy flower
When viewed in the context of the stanza before, this excerpt gives us a sense of what the spring eruption of yellow might mean. Because “what might have been” vanishes before “bright fruit” appears, we can infer that winter is a stand-in for regret (or for things we wish had happened). Yellow becomes a symbol of the peace and beauty that comes with embracing the present — whether it’s finding the opportunity in difficult circumstances, appreciating the people in your life, or even being thankful for the material things you have.
“Symphony in Yellow” by Oscar Wilde (1889)
Most people remember Oscar Wilde primarily for his plays and for his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, Wilde was also an accomplished poet. His poems (including “Symphony in Yellow”) beautifully illustrate his contributions to the aesthetic movement of 19th-century Europe. This movement — also known simply as “aestheticism” — held that art existed purely for its beauty. It didn’t have to serve any moral or political purpose.
Wilde also coined the saying “art for art’s sake,” which is a beautifully concise summary of what aestheticism stood for. Likewise, “Symphony in Yellow” is a great example of a poem that’s intentionally devoid of subtext.
Instead, the many bursts of yellow here are purely meant for the reader’s enjoyment. Characterizing this brief poem as a “symphony” is also especially apt. Just as many different instruments come together to create a symphony, various descriptions of yellow objects come together to paint a vivid picture.
In a sense, this poem is a composition in the key of yellow. We see a yellow omnibus (compared to a yellow butterfly), yellow hay, yellow fog (compared to a silk scarf), and falling yellow leaves. At the very end, a burst of green comes in like a countermelody— we see the iconic Thames River compared to a piece of jade.
“Symphony in Yellow” might not be intended to carry a lot of subtext. But if you want to take a brief, meditative escape from the stressors of everyday life, take a moment to ponder the extraordinary landscape Wilde has captured in words.
“Yellow” by Anne Sexton (1972)
Anne Sexton’s poem “Yellow” is one of those exquisite pieces whose figurative language is vivid enough to feel literal. The speaker won’t literally polish her bones or drink the poem or eat heat by the spoonful, but these images stand out in terms of both their subtext and their pure vividness. They’re unusual enough to be remembered long after you’ve finished the poem.
Notably, while this poem is called “Yellow,” the word itself only appears once within the piece (and it’s only used to reference the title of the poem itself). However, there are plenty of images of often-yellow things: the sun, fire (“I’ll light up my soul/with a match”), and heat. If we trace these images through the poem, we can get a sense of its subtext.
The very first lines — “When they turn the sun/on again” — give us a hint as to what’s going on. The speaker is waiting for the sun to turn back on, so she is likely dealing with grief, depression, or another influence that is making her life seem dark. She knows that the sun will be back on eventually, so there’s an implication that she’s been through this same cycle before.
The other yellow (or at least yellow-adjacent) images give us a sense of how the speaker will come back from the depths of the darkness she’s in. The image of lighting up her soul with a match is a powerful one — it suggests that the speaker is going to reignite her passion for life. Similarly, she’ll fill herself with warmth and joy by drinking a poem called Yellow and eating spoonfuls of heat.
While the first part of the poem focuses on a return to happiness and vitality, the very end creates an image of a mythical-sounding place of unending joy:
everyone will be home playing with their wings and the planet will shudder with all those smiles and there will be no poison anywhere, no plague in the sky and there will be a mother-broth for all of the people and we will never die, not one of us, we'll go on won't we?
This portion doesn’t literally focus on yellow. Instead, it echoes the feelings that yellow so often inspires: warmth and joy.
However, the ending isn’t as clear-cut as that interpretation implies. The speaker could very possibly be talking about a literal home with a happy family. She also might be wishing that she can return to happiness and stay away from the depths of depression forever. The use of “everyone will be home playing with/their wings” and “we will/never die” also suggests that she may be referencing the heavenly home of eternal life.
Ultimately, in this poem, yellow symbolizes reaching happiness after darkness — whether it’s happiness on this Earth or afterward.
Yellow Symbolism in Prose
Yellow’s dynamism isn’t limited to the world of poetry. For centuries, it’s been used symbolically in prose, too. Below, you’ll discover a selection of prose pieces from the 1800s to today that prominently feature the color yellow as a symbol.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
Many people’s minds go straight to this iconic story when they think of yellow being used symbolically in literature. “The Yellow Wallpaper” might be a centuries-old tale, but it’s still taught in countless literature courses.
The story centers around a narrator who, shortly after giving birth to a child, begins to suffer from “nervous depression.” Her husband is a doctor and believes that what she needs is a “rest cure.” The rest cure was a Victorian-era psychiatric treatment almost always prescribed for women. The patient would be confined to a room for weeks and even months at a time, fed a high-fat diet, and given massages to reduce muscle atrophy.
Not surprisingly, many women found that the rest cure stifled their creativity, needlessly encroached on their autonomy, and even exacerbated their existing mental health symptoms. Our narrator is one of these women.
Instead of showing the narrator’s mental state by describing only her symptoms, Gilman uses the room’s ugly yellow wallpaper (or more specifically, the narrator’s perception of the wallpaper) to illustrate her gradual decline.
Before we see a few examples of how the wallpaper works symbolically, it’s important to understand why Gilman chose yellow as the color for the wallpaper. Many of us associate yellow with happiness and joy. However, it can also be associated with sickness and decay.
If you’ve ever seen someone suffering from jaundice, you might already understand why. The skin of someone with jaundice has a sickly yellow tint that’s entirely different from the warm glow of a sunrise. Similarly, when a person is newly deceased, their skin begins to take on a yellow-green cast, too.
The wallpaper’s color is an important part of the story’s symbolism. But so is the way its pattern seems to change for the narrator. When she first sees the wallpaper, she describes it in a vivid and memorable way:
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The first part of the description is almost comical. However, the latter part is a great example of foreshadowing: the pattern plunges into chaos and despair, much like the narrator will by the end of the story.
The days go by, and the narrator is clearly feeling overly isolated in the room. She continues to comment on the wallpaper, but there’s a new development: she now sees a “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” behind the main pattern. The longer she stays in the room, the more real the figure becomes. Soon after she first notices it, the figure starts to become more defined and more real: “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.”
The narrator tells her husband that she isn’t feeling any better and wishes she could leave. Her husband dismisses her concerns, saying he knows best because he’s a physician. When the narrator looks at the wallpaper next, the figure she sees within it is essentially a reflection of herself:
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
The narrator (at least subconsciously) identifies with the woman in the wallpaper. So it’s likely wishful thinking when she insists that she sees the woman “creeping” outside every window. By the end of the story, she sees herself as one of the “creeping women.” She attempts to free them from behind the wallpaper by peeling it from the walls, and when she sees countless creeping women outside, she writes, “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Ultimately, the yellow room in the story is symbolic of the rest cure itself. Just like many people see the color yellow as joyful, many people in the narrator’s time saw the rest cure as an effective treatment.
But to the narrator — an actual patient subjected to this “cure” — yellow is hideous. As we see, the “rest cure” only worsens her condition. By the end of the story (on what is supposed to be the last day of her “treatment”), she has descended into psychosis. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has said that she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to communicate the dangers of the “rest cure” to S. Weir Mitchell, a prominent neurologist and a major proponent of the treatment. It worked — Mitchell adjusted his treatment recommendations after reading her story.
“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Sylvia Plath is best known for her poetry. But in her relatively brief life, she also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called “The Bell Jar”. As you’d expect from a novel written by a poet, The Bell Jar is full of symbolism. Some of that is color symbolism.
Just like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” this novel uses yellow as a symbol of death or decay. And more specifically, yellow comes to symbolize the narrator’s marked decline in mental health. From the outset, Esther (the narrator) describes herself as being “yellow.” At first, it’s because her tan has faded. But later, she describes herself as being yellow with no explanation, as if the color is now just part of who she is.
Yellow is also used to foreshadow the narrator’s decline, although the foreshadowing is so subtle it’s easy to miss. When Esther visits Buddy, her boyfriend at the time, she notices a fountain:
The fountain spurted a few inches into the air from a rough length of pipe, threw up its hands, collapsed and drowned its ragged dribble in a stone basin of yellowing water.
The fountain foreshadows Esther’s general trajectory in life (and throughout the novel). At first, like the fountain spurting into the air, Esther’s life seems full of promise — when the novel opens, she’s in New York because she won a writing contest for a fashion magazine. The “rough length of pipe” the fountain emerges from suggests that Esther has had to overcome some adversity to achieve what she has. In this case, the adversity is her struggle with her mental health.
The personification of the fountain here is unexpected but effective. Just as Esther later seems to give in to her (probable) mental illness, the fountain “threw up its hands, collapsed and drowned its ragged dribble.” When it does so, it falls into “yellowing water” — just as Esther later seems to be subsumed by her struggles with mental health.
Later on in the novel, the yellow symbolism becomes even clearer. Using the cord from a yellow bathrobe, Esther tries unsuccessfully to hang herself. Despite this turn of events, the novel itself isn’t entirely grim. By the end, we even see Esther walking into her future with a sense of hope.
“Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020)
When you think of gothic horror novels, what color do you picture? You might imagine various shades of jet black, shadowy eigengrau, and misty gray. But did you know that yellow often appears symbolically in these eerie and intriguing stories?
One striking instance of yellow color symbolism comes in “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The novel centers on Noemí, a wealthy woman from Mexico City. Noemí travels to High Place, the estate where her cousin Catalina lives with the mysterious Doyle family, a family she’s married into.
Catalina claims Howard is trying to murder her and that she’s seeing ghosts, so Noemí is visiting to check on her and see if there’s any truth to her claims. She discovers that the Doyle family is one full of festering, sinister secrets and moral decay.
Those secrets and decay are symbolized by what the Doyles call “the gloom” — a yellow fungus that can (1) extend human life and (2) serve as a repository of the memories of all the Doyle ancestors. The fungus grows in tunnels running under the house.
This yellow fungus is described vividly when Noemí and Catalina discover the hidden tunnel to the Doyle family crypt (with bonus yellow tile):
On the ground and on the walls she noticed a few tiny yellowish mushrooms popping up between stone cracks. It was cold and damp, and no doubt the mushrooms found the conditions underground deeply inviting, for as they advanced they seemed to multiply, clustering together in small clumps.
The gloom is an especially effective symbol because it works on different levels. It’s a fungus, which (like secrets) thrives in dark places. It’s yellow in color, and yellow is a color that can be used to symbolize moral decay (and decay in general).
The color of the gloom is also a nod to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and it’s not a coincidence that the house itself has yellow wallpaper. Members of Catalina’s family — both her biological family and the family she’s married into — dismiss her concerns about the house and the Doyle family as paranoid delusions. And just like the wallpaper in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the wallpaper at High Place is “ugly” and “hideous.”
“The Woman in the Purple Skirt” by Natsuko Imamura (2019)
If you aren’t familiar with “The Woman in the Purple Skirt” by Natsuko Imamura, you might be surprised to see it on the list — the color mentioned in the title is purple, not yellow! However, the color symbolism comes from the narrator, someone identified as the woman in the yellow cardigan. The story centers around the woman in the yellow cardigan’s fascination with the titular character, the woman in the purple skirt.
That fascination leads to strange happenings. After all, the book is categorized as a psychological thriller. The woman in the yellow cardigan develops what one might call a parasocial relationship, meaning that while she develops a sense of closeness and even familiarity with the woman in the purple skirt, the woman in the purple skirt has no idea she exists.
The narrator’s sense of loneliness and isolation is a central part of the story. Through her narration, we find that she even seems almost detached from herself:
For now, let’s just say she’s the Woman in the Purple Skirt, and I’m the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan.
Unfortunately, no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That’s the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt.
When the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan goes out walking in the shopping district, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention. But when the Woman in the Purple Skirt goes out, it’s impossible not to pay attention. Nobody could ignore her.
The women’s respective color descriptors carry a lot of symbolic weight. Purple is an ostentatious shade traditionally connected to royalty, so it’s a fitting color for the woman the narrator focuses on so obsessively (and who seems to be noticed by everyone).
So why is the narrator dressed in yellow? From relatively early in the novel, we can see that yellow isn’t symbolizing joy and hope in this context. The symbolism here is somewhat reminiscent of the symbolism in both The Yellow Wallpaper and Mexican Gothic: it’s connected to general unwellness.
Anyone who focuses on a stranger with the intensity that the woman in the yellow cardigan focuses on the woman in the purple skirt is not entirely well. The woman in the yellow cardigan’s pervasive loneliness and lack of connection with the rest of the world leads to some troubling behavior.
Fortunately, that troubling behavior makes for an interesting read. You might consider the woman in the yellow cardigan to be a villain of sorts, but she’s much more complex than your typical thriller villain. Because the book is told in first person, we get a look into the narrator’s enigmatic mind.
See Yellow in a New Light
To many people, yellow is a cheery but one-dimensional shade. However, as you’ve seen, yellow can have layers of symbolic meaning in poems, short stories, novels, and more. If you take a moment to look a little closer each time you see this color in poetry and prose, you’ll gain a deeper appreciation for your favorite pieces of literature.
Continue exploring and discover what all the other colors mean in literature.
