The Blue Bird is a partsong (Op. 119 No. 3) composed by Charles Villiers Stanford in 1910. It is set to the words of L'Oiseau Bleu, a poem by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, which depicts a bluebird in flight over a lake.  "The Blue Bird" uses harmonic, rhythmic and other elements of the music to depict the imagery of the poem. The soprano part plays an important role in illustrating the blue bird itself.  The wide range of the soprano line as illustrating "the bird's free flight across the lake", and the repeated instances of the word "blue" on an E-flat as the bird "hovering".

The lake lay blue below the hill.
O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.

According to musician and writer Walter Bitner, "the poem's great beauty lies in its direct expression of natural beauty and its power to evoke a strong impression in the imagination of the reader … The poet carefully identifies the subject of the poem as 'I' so that as each of us reads or hears it, we see this image in our mind's eye as if we ourselves are the witness of the event … It is pure impressionism."

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