Blue

Tim O'Hare

What is blue
and is whatever it is the same for me as it is for you?

A scientist might state that blue describes:
'colours perceived by a human when observing light having a primary wavelength
in the range four-hundred-and-fifty to four-hundred-and-ninety-five nanometres',
which may well tell us how blue can arise –
in the human mind, when a certain type of electromagnetic radiation enters the eyes -
but does not, I think, tell us what blue really is.
For how can we be sure
that the imagined colour that my mind selects in its constant rush
to paint upon its ever-changing canvas
comes from the same small pan into which you dipped your own brush?

You can say that blue is the colour of the sky (by day at least)
or of the vast expanse of open sea (mostly)
or the shirt worn by the best team (certainly not).
But what if you see all of those as I see green?
(And then we agree those shirts belong to by far the greatest team the world has ever seen).

So what is blue
to me or to you?

To complicate matters further...
Blue could refer not to the colour of a sight but, rather, to the tone of my thoughts.
But if I tell you that, just now, the thoughts inside my head are blue,
how do you know whether I am simply feeling a little down on my luck
or whether my mind, unleashed, is filled with a tumble of racy thoughts?
Again, we come unstuck.

We must agree then, I think, to put aside the ambiguities
and to take the scientist’s definition, with all of its nanometres, at face value.
Then we can label the sky as blue and the sea as blue;
we can assume my mood is melancholy even it is really full of sauce;
and we can move on
(although, we will never agree about those shirts of course).

The Science

‘Blue’ muses on what we mean by a colour and whether we can ever be sure that what we individually see and label as a colour in our mind’s eye matches what is seen by other observers. The poem introduces a scientific description of how a colour arises from our internal response to electromagnetic radiation entering our eyes, noting fundamental ambiguities that arise from there being a range of possible wavelengths associated with any given colour and the fact that it is impossible to ever know what another person experiences. It suggests that as we can never resolve this ambiguity the best we can do is to choose to agree (or not) on the colour labels we attach to things, even though this agreement often comes with caveats and conditions and may be limited by personal biases. There is also some playful consideration of how the labels we use to describe colours may be used to describe our moods or the tone of our thoughts thereby introducing further ambiguity into what it means to describe something by naming its colour.

The Poet

Tim O'Hare is a University Lecturer in oceanography and meteorology who lives in Plymouth, England. He suddenly and entirely unexpectedly started to write poetry in summer 2023 at the age of 58 and discovered that it provided a wonderful way to tease apart and play with the great mass of idea threads that were knotted together inside his head. He enjoys running long distances, walking in the countryside, supporting Plymouth Argyle Football Club, trying to write, reading books, and finding out more about all kinds of things (including himself!).

Next poem: Contrary to popular belief by Tanis MacDonald