Rust colors - OneLook

Literary analysis:

Literary authors have long used the color “rust” to evoke a mood of faded grandeur and the passage of time. In some texts, “rust” appears as a vivid descriptor of natural and manmade decay—a field is depicted as “rust‑colored” and new yet dreadful in its earthen hue ([1]), while streaks of this reddish-brown tint break through the purity of snow ([2]). In other passages, objects bear the mark of time with hues of red and brown: an iron shoe-buckle crusted with “red rust” ([3]) and a little toy soldier described as “red with rust” ([4]). Elsewhere, the color deepens the atmosphere in poetic language, with instruments and banners characterized by “sickles dark with rust” ([5]) and “rust‑brown bandeaux” ([6]), or by natural contrasts where walls of rock are rendered “rust‑colored” ([7]) and meadows are painted “like rust upon the season’s gold” ([8]). This recurring use of “rust” as a color not only highlights the beauty in disrepair but also serves as a powerful metaphor for the inevitable effects of time and neglect.

It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steep hillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful.
— from A Volunteer Poilu by Henry Beston
142 Stern pointed to faint, rust-colored streaks in the snow between the imprints of the bear’s foot pads.
— from Secret Mission to Alaska Sandy Steele Adventures #5 by Robert Leckie
I stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron shoe-buckle.
— from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 21 by Robert Louis Stevenson
But sturdy and stanch he stands, And the little toy soldier is red with rust
— from Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions — Volume 2 by Slason Thompson
Such sharpen once more upon the whetstone their sickles dark with rust and cause their mattocks, foul with want of use, to shine as of old.
— from Claudian, volume 2 (of 2) With an English translation by Maurice Platnauer by Claudius Claudianus
The rust-brown bandeaux, ruffled by the pressure of her head upon the pillow, gleamed in the dying sunlight like a nimbus.
— from Mr. Wayt's Wife's Sister by Marion Harland
They are masked here and there by groups of trees and shrubs, whose fresh verdure is in happy contrast with the ragged walls of rust-colored rock.
— from The Usurper: An Episode in Japanese History by Judith Gautier
It was in the pathway of a broad meadow, deep with grass, wherein the red sorrel topped the yellow buttercup, like rust upon the season's gold.
— from Rhoda Fleming — Complete by George Meredith

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