Fragmentary Blue
Fragmentary Blue - meaning Summary
Desire for Complete Beauty
The poem questions why people fixate on small, isolated beauties—birds, flowers, stones, faces—when the sky offers an overwhelming, continuous blue. It contrasts fragmentary instances of color with the vastness of heaven’s “solid hue,” and suggests that these small sightings only intensify longing rather than satisfy it. The speaker briefly entertains scientific or philosophical claims that earth contains sky, but still treats ordinary glimpses of blue as mere appetisers for a larger, unattained ideal.
Read Complete AnalysesWhy 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? 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.
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