Burke writes that " We refer to the utterance as “portraiture,” as the “self-expression” of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s “personality” whether or not he so wills it." (41) Later, he notes that poetic symbolism requires a different kind of understanding. In reading his discussion of portraiture and the use of symbols I started thinking more broadly about symbols. I had been thinking about symbols in the terms of words and man as the symbol using animal but I'd neglected to think about the more concrete definition of symbol: A written character or mark used to represent something; a letter, figure, or sign conventionally standing for some object, process, etc. (OED, 2d edition, 1989). I think that the pivotal point in this definition is the word "conventionally" as it implies the shared social meaning the Burke discusses later when he writes that "the 'weighting' of words arises from extra-poetic situations in the social order" (41). It seems that it is precisely in the contested conventionality of symbols that confusion and rhetoric occur.

In making the link between Burke's portraiture and visual rhetoric, I am curious about how these principals can be extended into the use of color as a symbol. Colors are used symbolically (we can use green for envy and red for power, but green and red together for Christmas). In contrast to the symbol-system of words that at least has a dictionary to which we can refer for direction, color (as far as I know) has no such equivalent. In this context, how can we interpret the use of color as a symbol?

[For example, I was thinking about this excerpt from Adam Bede:
"It was a still afternoon - the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and' its edge of faintly-sprinkled moss; an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath." (Eliot, Chapter 12, p. 175).]