A poem with a colour in its title usually wants to paint with it. "From But to Blue" does something stranger. It treats the colour as a place you have to travel to, and the smallest word in the title, "but", as the place you set out from. The poem is about moving from hesitation into feeling, and about how that movement keeps bending back on itself.
The first line sets the scale: "Blue is a big distance, the others are not." We never learn what "the others" are. They might be other colours, other words or other moods, but they sit close by while blue lies far off. Blue does tend to suggest distance, as in sky or faraway hills, though the poem leaves that association for the reader to supply. The second line gives an order: "Make a circle from from to now." The doubled "from" reads like a stumble, but it is a clever one. The first "from" is the word itself, treated as a thing, a starting point. The second is the ordinary preposition. Grammar becomes geography, and the circle runs from origin to the present moment.
"But" is the word we use to object, qualify and swerve, so "the difference from but to blue is your big jump" describes leaping from a word of argument to a word of feeling. The sound carries the jump. Hard b's bounce through "blue," "big," "but," "jump," and later "back" and "by," as if the line itself were hopping. The next line, "You're a little high on nothing," deflates the leap with a deadpan joke. "High" suggests both altitude after the jump and a slightly giddy, unfounded lightness. The "nothing" gives that lightness no cause.
In the third couplet the poem's own vocabulary folds in on itself. "Your snuggle up is their nothing but" takes the "nothing" from the previous stanza and joins it to "but" to make the idiom "nothing but," meaning "only." Your retreat into comfort becomes, in other people's eyes ("their"), merely that. A quiet social pressure enters here, a *you* set against a *they*. Then the grammar gives way: "Getting from blue to there's a problem." Read quickly, "to there's" tangles into one lump, and the reader has to stop and sort out where the sentence is going. We feel the problem of crossing from blue to "there" because the line is itself hard to cross. "There" is the counterpart of the earlier "now," and the poem suggests it is not easy to reach from blue.
The last couplet offers a way out that is really a way round: "You go and come back by the next blue. / It makes a circle." The circle ordered in line two is now simply observed. The poem opened on "blue" and closes on "blue," so its shape mirrors its claim. Whether this is comforting or bleak is left open. Coming back by "the next blue" might mean the next sky, the next mood or the next day, and the flat final sentence sounds like a shrug, a fact accepted rather than solved.
Formally the poem is four unrhymed couplets with no regular metre. Almost every line is a short, end-stopped sentence made of plain, mostly one-syllable words. The effect is of someone explaining a game, or a riddle, in a calm voice. Rhyme is replaced by repetition: "blue" returns four times in the body, and "big," "nothing" and "circle" each appear twice. "Big" links the distance of the first line to the jump of the third, so the leap is exactly as large as the gap. The long "oo" of "blue" also echoes in "you" and "to," so the colour and the person addressed are quietly bound together.
The poem is significant because it shows that a mood can be mapped without being described. There are no tears or weather here, only conjunctions, prepositions and a colour. By making small words feel like places, it lets the reader experience the gap between hedging and feeling, and the way a low mood loops back. It is short enough to read in seconds, and it rewards rereading, which fits a poem about going round again.