Nobody in Ram Krishna Singh's "Rainbow" gets a name, an age or a place. They are simply "they", and the poem's first move is to catch them in the act of disguise: they "colour their hair" and "paint the face to look younger". The verbs matter. Colouring and painting are things done to a surface, and the flat "the face", rather than "their faces", makes it sound like a canvas instead of a person. The stanza then ends on its sting: they "speak aged lies". The phrase is slippery. The lies might be stale, well-worn ones, or the kind only a long life teaches you to tell. Or the line might simply point at a mismatch, a youthful face with an elderly, practised voice. Whichever reading you prefer, the surface has been repainted and the speech has not.
The sentence spills over the stanza break, so the lies seem to serve the colours: all this effort is "to match rainbow life". The word "rainbow" appears only here, in a poem that carries it as its title, so it works almost as a slogan, a life imagined as bright, orderly and pleasing to look at. Then comes the turn on "but". These people "stare / into the sky to find / which colour follows which". It is a funny, slightly sad picture: grown adults studying the heavens like pupils memorising the order of the spectrum, as if a vivid life were a recipe to copy. The repeated "which", which ends the line and sends it looping back on itself, captures their fussiness. Yet the sky does not cooperate. The colours are "melding into one". A real rainbow has no borders, and one band slides into the next without a seam. The imitators need sharp categories, but the thing they are imitating refuses to supply them.
The last stanza makes the problem concrete. "they wonder what to do / with beige and indigo shades". The choice of these two colours looks deliberate. Beige is not in the rainbow at all; it is the colour of the plain, the faded, the unremarkable. Indigo is in the rainbow, but it is the band most people struggle to pick out, a dark, deepening stretch between blue and violet. One is too dull to count and the other too deep to isolate. Reading symbolically, as the imagery invites, these could stand for what no dye can cover: ordinary days, sadness, ageing itself. They "stick their vision", a deliberately awkward phrase. The shades might cling to the eyes like stains or lodge in them like a splinter, but either way they cannot be looked past.
The poem's construction supports this meaning. Its ten lines fall into three short stanzas of three, four and three lines, and there is no rhyme and no punctuation at all. The lines are brief and conversational, closer to overheard speech than to song, which suits a poem about plain truth showing through decoration. Without full stops, the whole thing runs as one continuous thought, and, tellingly, it never closes: the final line simply stops, leaving the question of "what to do" unanswered. Sound does quiet work too. The soft m, l and n of "melding into one" enact the blending they describe, while the harder consonants of "stick their vision" jar against it. There is also a movement of attention across the stanzas, from the face, to the sky, and back to the eyes, as though the gaze goes out looking for an answer and returns with a problem.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have been a sneer at vanity, but "they wonder" gives its subjects bewilderment instead of villainy, and we recognise something of ourselves in them. Its point is not that colour is bad, but that choosing only the flattering shades is impossible. A life, like a rainbow, blends into one thing, and the dull and dark bands come with the bright ones. In ten spare lines, the poem leaves us with a question: if you cannot paint over beige and indigo, what do you do with them?