I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure impression. Rather, to see is to have colours or lights, to hear is to have sounds, to sense (sentir) is to have qualities. To know what sense-experience is, then, is it not enough to have seen a red or to have heard an A? But red and green are not sensations, they are the sensed (sensibles), and the quality is not an element of consciousness, but a property of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensations, if we consider it in the experience itself which evinces it, the quality is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived”. (Merleau-Ponty 2005: 3-5) ⁴

One can not but agree with the Polish scholar Magdalena Wasilewska-Chmura’s point of view in her study on the colours in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetic sight where she concludes:

“Av ovannämnda analyser framgår att färgerna representerar synens dominans i Tranströmer’s poetiska universum och seendet som paradigmatisk kontakt mellan jaget och världen. På det konkreta planet signalerar de sinnenas beredskap att ta emot världens fascinerande mångfald, dock inte i form av separerade intryck utan gestaltade i en total fenomenologisk förnimmelse. På det metaforiska planet betecknar de människans öppenhet för allehanda impulser - från subtila nyanser och knappt förnimbara förändringar till upplevelser av oanad intensitet. Hos Tranströmer utgör ögat och synen en väg till såväl den yttre som den inre verkligheten”. (Wasilewska-Chmura 2013: 178).

This process features largely the above mentioned trinity of words, tones and colours, which, in its turn, undergoes metamorphoses almost everywhere in Tranströmer’s poetry. While the tone in Allegro is green, its pitch in other poems, like C Major (C-dur), serves as a trembling compass directed towards whiteness; the whiteness of the snow, of the piano keys, of a symphony by Mozart or Schubert, of the ecstasy of a deeply intimate experience. Here again, the verbal aspect of the poem is submerged into the symbolism of a chromatic area that functions as a plastic code and becomes a major element in stylistics deeply rooted in metaphysics and mysticism, in analogy to the unleashed energy of human feelings and impulses and of love in counterpoint with a mental echo of a symphony in C Major of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)⁵: