Introduction: dull red; Part 1 The romantics: awful Newton; a rainbow in the sky; blue, glossy green and velvet black; woven colours; purple riot. Part 2 Robert Browning : blind hope; rainbow flakes; seven proper colours chorded; the subtle prism; the red thing; by white and red describing human flesh; the crimson quest. Part 3 Gerard Manley Hopkins: pure skies; two flock, two folds - black and white; dappled things; gold vermilion.

In this book colour words as used in the poetry of Keats, Browning and Hopkins become crucial indicators of a way of looking at the nineteenth-century world. The author traces the forging of language that mediates between a system of values and the flux of experience.