Color Symbolism in the Poetry of Bader Shaker Al-Sayyab: "The Rain Song" Collection as an Example

Abstract

This study aims at exploring color symbolism in the poetry of Bader Shaker Al-Sayyab by considering the poetry collection “The Rain Song” as an example-since it is the most relevant in this regard among the poet’s poems. The study explores different colors like black, red, green, white, and yellow. There are less used colors in the poems of the collection, but we focus on dominant ones. Color has given the poetic texts an artistic dimension and contributed to elevating the typical employment of color to a symbolic use. This, in turn, has given a psychological, intellectual, and cultural depth to the poet’s work and enriched the texts at artistic and semantic levels.