a yellow wall

... on my way home: corner of Benton and Temple.  I think it may be the police station.  It is very yellow - but how would one find words for its yellowness?  We were talking about yellow in my grad class today - in relation to 1880s and 1890s poetry, Mona Caird's "The Yellow Drawing Room," and various other things, including Richard Jefferies' wonderful essay "Nature and Books," in which he asks "What is the colour of the dandelion?" (but you know that, if you've heard me talk about dandelions at any point over the past few years ...); talks about the inadequacy of color terms to sum up dandelions, and speculates 

    Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by means of natural             objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green, spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-        bee amber? And there are fungi that have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics      are not pleasant. Butterfly blue—but there are several varieties; and this plan is interfered         with by two things: first, that almost every single item of nature, however minute, has got a      distinctly different colour, so that the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so         very few would know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no                     meaning...

by which point one finds oneself in the middle of a Sherwin-Williams paint chart.  

If you look carefully, there's a quite different pale primrose yellow fence, beyond.

I do find color quite irresistible as a subject, but not all of my grad students (all in English) seem quite as gripped - and today's revelation - today's gloomy revelation - was that five out of the six of them find poetry "difficult," and shy away from it wherever possible, and so my on the spot compare/contrast between Arthur Symons' "Nora on the Pavement" and Sarojini Nadu's "Indian Dancers" was, shall we say, lost on them ...