CHW: Blue still suggests melancholy. Novalis wrote about the Land of the Blue Flower, so did Frances Hodgson Burnett. Housman's line is well-remembered...

Maurice Maeterlink's "L'Oiseau Bleu", as I remember it, is mentioned once or twice in "Lolita" ( or only Maeterlinck?).

I share M.R's enthusiasm about the effect VN has on his readers: Until now I had never wondered why Portuguese and Spanish have absorbed the word "azul" and no other with the "bl" sound, and why it is uncommon in the other languages. Thanks to VN we got contributions with poems written by Wilbur, Yeats, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Frost!

A long time ago I read an interesting Spanish novel about the blue pigments used for paintings and how Southern Europe kept its secrets about perspective while the Flemish hid theirs about staying pigments and lapis lazuli.

CHW, in German "Blau" is indicates alcoholic intoxication; in Anglophone countries blue is for sadness and there are the American "Blues". In Brazil the expression "tudo azul" ( everything is blue) indicates that all is well. Perhaps that's also what appears in Italian "nel blu di pinto di blu"( I don't know how to spell it right)

For those who are still interested in "Blue", I refer them to "The Annotated Stella Blue" ( lyrics from The Grateful Dead ) at: arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/stella.html -

"However, there is a character in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire (1962) named Stella Blue. In the "Commentary" portion of the novel, in the note to line 627, which discusses the "great Starover Blue," and astronomer, Nabokov writes:
"The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover ..., that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. "Blue." This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube." (p. 236)

Additionally, there are two very famous Stellas in English literature, both pseudonymous names for actual women in the lives of the poets who addressed them, Sir Philip Sidney and Jonathan Swift. "

What's in store next ? Inenubilable?

"The clear blue of the unclouded sky" (OED) and the connection to "blue inenubilable Zembla"

In: negation, Nubil...clouds... And there is a word-play with the French, or so I imagine with a reference not only to "cloudless Zembla", but also the hint at "l'oubli" (unforgettable)? I wonder if nubile and un-marriageable could be added since it always occurs to me, although I think it doesn't realy apply ( inspite of our beloved Charles' sexual inclinations).

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