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About this quote

What does it mean?
Describes the color orange as bright and glowing like lamps against green.
In plain terms
Orange looks like bright lights on green.
What can you take from it?
Color contrasts create vivid visual imagery.

Where it applies

  • art description
  • poetry
  • landscape observation

Putting it to work

  • visual description
  • art critique

Questions to consider

  • How do colors interact?
  • What makes an image vivid?

Another view

It relies on specific visual context to be understood.

More from Andrew Marvell

  1. Where the remote Bermudas ride, In th' ocean's bosom unespied.

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  2. And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.

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  3. Therefore the love which us doth bind, But Fate so enviously debars, Is the conjunction of the mind, And opposition of the stars.

    Permalink to quote #28

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