BLUE NOTES

 

'Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli'

(Exodus 24:10)

'Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro'

(Dante Alighieri)

'At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,

Tomorrow to fresh and pastures new'

(John Milton)

'Within the circuit of this plodding life

there enters moments of azure hue'

(Henry David Thoreau)

'Tell me how far the morning leaps,

Tell me what time the weaver sleeps

Who spun the breadths of blue!'

(Emily Dickinson)

'Oh never weep for love

that's dead,

since love is seldom true,

but changes his fashion

from blue to red

from brightest red to blue'

(Elizabeth Siddal)

'Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green,

Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,

Forget-me-not, the bluebell and, that queen

Of secrecy, the violet with strange powers.'

(John Keats)

'The tender azure of the unruffled deep'

(Lord Byron)

'Returning home, I mounted on horseback and galloped to the steppe.

I love to gallop on a fiery horse through the tall grass, in the face of the

desert wind; greedily I gulped down the fragant air and fixed my gaze

upon the blue distance.'

(Mikhail Lermontov)

'Moi, je trouvé ma tulipe noir et mon dahlia bleu'

(Charles Baudelaire)

'On nage dans l'air bleu, c'est effrayant'

(Claude Monet)

' Par le soirs bleus d'été j'irai dans les sentiers"

'L'azur sonneur'

(Arthur Rimbaud)

'Le Poète, l'amour du Beau, voilà sa foi,

L'azur, son étendard, et l'Ideal , sa loi!'

(Paul Verlaine)

'I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china'

'The sky is blue like the inside of a cup of lapis lazuli"

(Oscar Wilde)

'The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees.'

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

'Sigh, O you little stars! O, sigh and shake

your blue apparel!

'And the flame of the blue star of twilight,

hung low on the rim of the sky"

(W. B. Yeats)

'A blue moment is nothing less than soul'

(Georg Trakl)

'Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

the various ranks of varied green

going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,

talking of trivial things.'

(T.S. Eliot)

'The Seine, old egotist,

meanders imperturbably towards the sea,

                 Ruminating on

            Weeds and rain...

If through his sluggish

watery sleep come dreams

      they are the blue ghosts

of king-fishers.'

(Hope Mirrlees)

'Come, let us climb once more

these stairs of starlight. This

midnight stream of cloud-flung blue!'

(Conrad Aiken)

'And the blue went out of the sea, and it rolled in waves of pure lemon

which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach.'

'And the blue flowers arise, all orderly."

'And rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.'

'Why can't the summer last forever? and housemaids be forever blue and yellow.'

'My window completely filled with blue for a wonder."

'The sun blazes my skylight blue.'

'and yesterday had the great joy of smelling a dead horse in a field. No sooner smelt than 12 -no- 15 vultures descended from the azure and proceeded to pick it. They have blue bald necks like snakes.'

'I wish my dolphin were by my side, in a bath, bright blue, with her tail curled.'

'The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and bring the wave lapping blue to the shore.'

'With a feather, a blue feather...flying mountain through the air...there to lose what binds us here...'

"He began following her from room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as if the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked somebody, he listen to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply whatever came into her head, "We shall need a big dish to-night, Where is it-the blue dish?"

"If that blue could stay forever"

'I had begun to doubt my own identity-and imagined I was part of a seagull, and dreamt at night of deep pools of blue water, full of eels.'

'(And it must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs off on our thoughts)'

'And, I add, Green and Blue and the heron were the wild outbursts of freedom"

"Well now for my blue knitting"

(Virginia Woolf)

'I shall remember you standing in your blue apron and waving. Oh damn it, Virginia. I wish I didn't love you so much.'

(Vita Sackville-West)

'On the blue flames of honey, waterdrops of sapphire,

the bluebells(the blue fires of deepest air)'

(Edith Sitwell)

'All the things are floating in my brain on a sea of blue Ripolin'

(Katherine Mansfield)

'Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue

and purple dreams into my ears...

Pale blue lavender, you are the colour of the sky

when it is fresh-washed and fair...

I smell the stars...they are like tulips and narcissus.'

(Amy Lowell)

'O give me burning blue'

(H.D.)

'There shall be swallows bringing back the spring

over the long blue meadows of the sea.'

(Sara Teasdale)

'Blue letters light the entrance to Paradise put together

from little electric bulbs. Their blue is close to violet. It is a blue

of blue pansies and of the first morning mist to wreath itself over a

plowed field. It is a blue of vivid dreams and of cigarette smoke.

It is not the blue of heaven or of the Mediterranean. You see how

hard is to describe a colour.'

(Joseph Roth)

'Can we have beds here?' inquired Mr Pickwick, summoning the waiter.

'Don't know, Sir' replied the man; 'afraid we're full, sir- I'll inquire, Sir.'

Away he went for that purpose, and presently returned, to ask whether

the gentleman were 'Blue'

'Oh, Mr Fledgeby, said Mrs Lammle, to desert me in that way! 

Oh, Mr Fledgeby, to abandon my pure injured rose and declare for blue!'

(Charles Dickens)

'If I call stones blue it is because blue is the precise word, believe me.'

(Gustave Flaubert)

'Why does one take quite some time to recognize a color but then

after the decisive bend of the understanding quickly become ever

more convinced of the color. When the light from the front hall and

the light from the kitchen affect the glass door from outside at the same

time, greenish or rather not to depreciate the certainty of the impression,

green light pours almost all the way down the panes. When the light

in the hall is turned off and only the kitchen light remains, the pane

closer to the kitchen turns deep blue, the other whitish blue so whitish

that the whole drawing on the frosted glass(stylised poppy heads, tendrils,

various four-sided figures and leaves) dissolves.'

(Franz Kafka)

'it was blue o'clock the morning after the night before'

'Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil?'

'A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the.

Goldpinnacled hair.'

'Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on the rye.'

'The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheers '

'She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour 

and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on her because

the green she wore that day week brought grief'

'The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.'

(James Joyce)

'Hercule Poirot looked thoughtfully at his visitor.

He saw a pale face with a determined looking chin, eyes that were

more grey than blue, and hair that was of that real blue-black shade

so seldom seen-the hyacinthine locks of ancient Greece.'

'That's a funny thing on the ashtray. That's Egyptian, that is. It's a scarabee,

or some name like that. You know. Sounds like some kind of scratching disease

but it isn't. No, it's a sort of a beetle and it's made out of some stone. They call it

precious stone. Bright blue. A lazy-a lavis- a lazy lapin or something like that.

"Lapis lazuli," said Mrs Oliver.'

(Agatha Christie)

'Blurred with emotion, one's eyes turned toward a virgin dawn of divine colours,

towards a miraculous moistness of purest azure.'

'Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear."

(Bruno Schulz)

'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.'

(Francis Scott Fitzgerald)

'Blue is an idea about distance, or Literature ends in that particular blue,

or here are several subjunctive blues'

(Ben Lerner)

"Dios esta azul"

(Juan Ramon Jimenez)

'Eras azul como noche que acaba'

(Vicente Alexandre)

'If I haven't the red colour, I use the blue one'

(Pablo Picasso)

'Here is the flutter of the dreaming

Fast-living blue-eyed dragonflies'

'In a make-believe grove I have wandered

And into an azure cave delved.

Am I really real, I ponder,

And death will claim my true self?'

'I've learned you, blessed words, that man despises,

Ligeia, Seraphita, Straw, Lenore,

In giant bedroom heavy Nieva rises

And blue blood gushes from the granite floor.'

'Dragonflies weave paths across the blue'

(Ossip Mandelstam)

'If men at forty will be painting lakes

the ephemeral blues must merge for them in one.

The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails'

'He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,

then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still

the sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.

He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see

and not be touched by the blue.'

(Wallace Stevens)

'Du rose, ils tombèrent dans le bleu.'

'le bleu pâle de Paris' 

'Il songea qu'il touchait le lieu saint des suicides, bleu comme le ciel, bleu comme la liberté'

'Les mots bleus dont nous nous grisons

cessent un jour de nous rendre ivres'

'Ouvrant sur l'être et le non-etre

le criminel azur d'un rêve de Crimée'

'Je n'ai pas d'autre azur que ma fidélité'

(Louis Aragon)

'Le bleu renaît du gris, comme la pulpe éjectée d'un raisin noir'

'Boue, si méprisée, je t'aime. Je t'aime à raison de mépris ou l'on te tient,

Tu es si belle, après l'orage qui te fonde, avec tes ailes bleues.'

(Francis Ponge)

'Le banlieue est bleue

quand passe le juge'

(Benjamin Péret)

'Les cygnes languissants

ont fui les requins bleus '

'Marcel Duchamp: Sur le chemin,

il y avait un bœuf bleu près d'un banc

blanc. Expliquez-moi la raison 

de gants blancs

maintenant?'

(Robert Desnos)

'Bleu des jacinthes,

Bleu des profondeurs,

Il vient d'un feu faiseur de rouge

Qui tourne au violet puis au bleu.

Il est dans la terre,

il nous cherche.

La mer

Peut l'ignorer.'

'L'azur est loin

Qui m'envahit.'

(Eugène Guillevic)

'Melancholy breakfast

blue overhead blue underneath' 

'But I still fear to mention the blue

flowers. They scared me most and I

prolong other talk. There were fields of

them around the place, all blue, all

innocent. The artificial is always innocent.'

'Here I am at my desk. The

light is bright enough 

to read by it is a warm

friendly day I am feeling 

assertive. I slip a few

poems into the pelican's 

bill and he is off! out

the window into the blue!'

'I'm going to die unless 

my love soon chases

the clouds away

and the azure smiles

and browns my strong

belief that love is.'

(Frank O'Hara)

'July 4, Paris... Met the Lady of the Blue Pyjamas going over the bridge of a little canal.'

"And I asked her the color of her soul: Noir.'

(Harry Crosby)

'the deep blue air, that shows nothing,

and is nowhere, and is endless.'

'And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond the beach

Of shapes and shingles.'

(Philip Larkin)

'All the singing grass

busy with crickets and blue butterflies'

'Like streams the little by-roads run

Through oats and barley round the hill

To where blue willows catch the sun

By some white weather-boarded mill.' 

(John Betjeman)

'La terre est bleue comme une orange'

(Paul Eluard)

Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.

O color of distance and forgetfulness.'

'I woke one day to see you, mother,

Floating above me in bluest air

On a green balloon bright with a million

Flowers and bluebirds that never were

Never, never, found anywhere.'

'By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet'

'The sparks are blue.

The blue sparks spill,

splitting like quartz into a million bits.'

'Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light

Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.

Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.'

'This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.'

'A great surgeon, now a tattooist,

tattooing over and over the same blue grievances '

'And in truth it is terrible,

Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.

They buzz like blue children

In nets of the infinite.'

(Sylvia Plath)

'In the pit of red

you hid from the bone-clinic whiteness

But the jewel you lost was blue'

(Ted Hughes)

'The sea was then a very tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary'

(Jean Rhys)

'As if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind.'

(Maggie Nelson)

'Everything is blue.'

'Sparrows are now the

same shade of blue as the sky'

(Victoria Chang)

'Still, a little black bird

won't return from the sky

blue, either.

And we, too, aren't gods 

in miniature, that's clear.'

(Joseph Brodsky)

'Where is the grave

of Time? What would you picture for decay?

A horse's hoof, white bones, a lifeless tree,

cold hemispheres, dried moss, and a blue wave

breaking at noon on shores you will not see.'

(Weldon Kees)

'Ein dunkleres Blau wird zuteil deinem Haar, und ich rede von Liebe.'

'Die Sonnen des Halbschlaf sind blau wie dein Haar eine Stunde vor Morgen.'

'Im Blau 

spritcht sie schattenverheiBendes Baumwort

und deiner Liebe Namen

zahlt seine Silben hinzu.'

(Paul Celan)

'Shuttles of trains going

north, going south, drawing

threads of blue.'

(Louis MacNeice)

'But though you are lean and frozen

-think of the blue bulls of Babylon.'

'Lie there, blue city, mine at last'

'Among blue leaves

the apples green and red

upon one tree stand out

most enshrined.'

(William Carlos Williams)

'The light blue body of the mermaid.'

(Yorgos Seferis)

'Azure is a color that happily

promises great events'

(Adam Zagajewski)

'with an eyelid's double-beat

I consolidated the heavens

and with insane imagination

made them a shade of blue.'

(Zbigniew Hebert)

'Distances,

ecstatic motionlessness among the motion,

moments stilled in colour

pictures-

are we here or somewhere else?

The center is always light-blue.'

'And further on 

the light blue island  Iskia-

I'll place this as a sapphire on the ring'

'my azure mother 

boundless and borderless,

this azure mother who embraces

but never confines'

(Yannis Ritzos)

'The man who spends the whole day

In an open boat

moving over luminous bays

will fall asleep at last inside the shade

of his blue lamp

as the islands crawl like huge moths

over the globe.'

'A blue sheen

radiates from my clothes.

Midwinter.

Jangling tambourines of ices.

I close my eyes.

There is a soundless world

there is a crack

where dead people

are smuggled across the border.'

'I am a mummy at rest

in the blue coffin of the forests.'

'Laundry hung in blue air.'

'In among the copses there was a murmuring of words in 

a new language: the vowels were blue sky and the consonants

were black twigs...'

'Blue flowed past on the waters, flickering.'

'Ash-colored silence.

The blue giant passes by.

Cool breeze from the sea.'

(Tomas Transformer)

'The smooth stones you pick up and examine

under the moon's light have been blue

from the sea. Next morming

when you pull them from your trouser pocket,

they are still blue."

(Raymond Carver)

'We'd lie on benches and imagine how we would get to be a hundred years old, like turtles, and we'd still be together, in a house with light blue shutters, by the sea...'

'The men in dark blue suits were counting down the final seconds before the chain reaction of disintegration in Europe would be set off'

(Georgi Gospodinov)

"Suppose someone points to a vase and says 'Look at that marvellous blue-forget about the shape.

Or: 'Look at the marvellous shape-forget about the colour.' No doubt you'll do something different in each case."

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

'On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold

When the sky is a mild blue of a 

Chinese bowl'

(Carson McCullers)

'I want to be the largest animal that ever existed, the one blue mother.'

(Ada Limon)

'Dressed in the colours of a country day

(Grey-blue, blue grey, the 

white of seagulls' bodies)

Chardin's peasant woman'

(Eavan Boland)

'I was a hunter whose animal

Is that dark hour when 

the hemisphere moves

in the deep blue blaze of dews' 

'That hour when all the Earth

Is drinking the blue drop of thunder'

(Rosemary Tonks)

'On the great blue door,

where it hurts.'

(Kaveh Akbar)

'And blue-skinned gods

with magical flutes

seduce the virgins to dance.'

(Tishani Doshi)

'Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy

greening, greened and bluing the stone'

(Natalie Diaz)

'My world feels slightly askew, surreal and yet eerily normal -like one of those old sitcoms where characters turn off the lights at bedtimes, and suddenly everything glows blue.'

'Each autumn, when leaves begin to dream of gold, the night-tide at Derrynane shimmers neon blue.'

(Doireann Ni Ghriofa)

'We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot prenetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps

the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon

which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky

looks cold, even the sun looks cold.'

(Iris Murdoch)

'At the wake the night before, my grandfather became a spirit of blue flame. He flew out through the roof of the shrine, floated through the rooms of the nearby quarantine hospital, and left a disagreeable odour as he drifted through the village sky.'

(Yasunari Kawabata)

'A place where the seemingly ice-steeped sunlight streams in through stained-glass windows in various gradations of blue. A place where Christ hangs on the cross without the slightest trace of suffering'

'The morning hours when a blue-tinged light seeps from the bodies of all material things, penetrating your newly sleep-shorn eyes, miraculously.'

'Wandering into the living room at dawn, I felt as though all the furniture was wrapped in a blue cloth. A scene was playing out in which blue threads were being ceaseless spun out, filling the chilly air in front of me, and I would stand there in my long johns and stare at it, entranced. I had no idea that what seemed such a captivating hallucination was caused by my weakening eyesight.'

(Han Kang)

'It flows through me

like the blue wave.'

'The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower'

(Mary Oliver)

'The blue jay your neighbor

said was her mother'

(Hannah Sullivan)

'Blue jays spend every Friday with the devil, the old lady at the park told me.'

(Jenny Offill)

'If only all language

could be ululation in blue vests.'

(Chen Chen)

'Si tan solo las revoluciones fueran azules'

(Lleny Díaz)

'En la vigilia estoy siempre en el centro de una vaga neblina luminosa de tinte gris o azul; veo en los sueños o converso con muertos, sin que ninguna de esas cosas me asombre."

(Jorge Luis Borges)

"I only regret that there is no kindred soul,

To climb with me this ladder to the clouds in the blue.'

(Xie Lingyun)

'A monkey's leaped into the blue ripples of my mind!'

(Gido Shushin)

"Ah! The only thing that can sleep in this vast city night is the shadow of a single blue cat

The shadow of a cat that tells the sad history of humanity

The blue shade of happiness I long for."

(Hagiwara Sakutaro)

"Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness."

(Victoria Finlay)

'A boy accosted us asking for a coin. His face was dark blue like his clothes. He was mule driver and his appearance very similar to the "blue men" who dwell in the south of Atlas. The colour of their dress, we were told, shares the colour of their skin, so in this way, everyone, men and women, are blue. The only blue race.'

(Elías Canetti)

'Blue is a soothing colour for melancholy, it is neutral towards divinity.'

'L'azur vous invite au départ ; il est indiscret, il se mêle de votre vie, il réveille aussi en vous ce qu'il y a de morbide dans vos aspirations religieuses, le côté démoniaque de vos velléités mystiques.'

'Dix jours d'azur me mettent dans un état voisin de la folie.'

(Emil Cioran)

'The colour of nothing is blue'

(Charles Simic)

Music by Charles Mingus:

'Orange was the colour of her dress then blue silk'

     (Sung Pil-Chao, History of the Blue, 2020)