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Tone and Color

Two of my favorite pop songs are by U2: “One” and “Kite.” Both of these songs have melancholic tones (as I would call them) to them, but they are substantially different in what they conjure to my mind. When I hear “One,” I often seen a rain in an urban landscape. With “Kite,” I see an almost monochrome…or “two-chrome”…image, usually on the beach with the ocean. A strong wind with striking blue seas and skies and a nearly impossibly bright sandy beach.

Pop music, of course, uses both text and sound to create these moods, but I find the difference between the two striking. I think poetry can create these elements as well. The rhythm, the theme, the sounds contribute to this tone or mood. Poems can have color without relying on explicit color imagery, but of course, they can use that imagery. Wallace Stevens “Of Mere Being” uses images and colors to create a tone while retaining an element of abstraction, which is perhaps what I admire most about Stevens’s poetry: His ability to reside comfortably in the abstract imagination while providing a sense of concreteness to the poem.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.