How does Milton perceive and deploy colour in his poems? What colours does he use, and to what ends? To address these questions I work with three aspects of a sense of colour: (1) Hue, or tint; what you see in a paint-box; (2) Texture or surface; ranging from sheen or brilliancy to dullness or matt finish, with iridescence. (3) Depth or intensity of colour; Shakespeare’s “deep vermilion in the rose.” A fourth aspect is more general: (4) light, as the source of colourperception, with its correlative, darkness.