What Is Pink?

Christina Rossetti answers eight colour questions with things a child might see outdoors or at the table. The first answer takes us to a rose beside a fountain. The last is a joke: an orange is both the colour and the thing that shows it.

What do the words mean?

The "brink" is the edge of the fountain. A "barley bed" is where barley, a grain, grows. "Thro'" is short for "through". "Mellow" describes the pears as soft or sweet when ripe, and "twilight" is the dim light around sunset or sunrise. In this poem, the violet clouds belong to a summer evening.

Try a colour hunt

Ask a child to find something pink, green, or yellow nearby. Turn each answer into a new line, then add where the object is or what it is doing. Two readers can take turns asking and answering. At the end, look for a word that can name both a thing and a colour, like "peach".

The poem appears in Rossetti's Sing-Song, the nursery collection first published in 1872. The text here follows the 1893 enlarged edition. Boats Sail on the Rivers comes from the same collection and also uses familiar sights to lead to a surprise.