Arthur Rimbaud
At 16 he gave every vowel a color: A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue. At 20 he quit poetry.
- Lived
- 1854–1891
- Voyelles
- Written 1871, published 1883
- Stopped writing
- Around age 20
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) wrote nearly all his poetry between about 15 and 20, then stopped and spent the rest of his short life as a trader and traveler, much of it in Africa. In May 1871, at 16, he wrote to friends that a poet must become a 'seer' through a long, deliberate derangement of all the senses. Within months he had written Voyelles, a sonnet that gives each vowel a color: A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.
Two years later, in A Season in Hell, he looked back on it in a section titled 'Alchemy of the Word': “J'inventai la couleur des voyelles!” (I invented the color of the vowels!). The title ties his poetics to alchemy, the art of transformation, and the vowel colors read like a recipe for turning sound into sight.
Was he a synesthete? There's no evidence for it. Scholars have traced the colors to a childhood alphabet book or colored letter blocks, to occult reading, or to nothing at all. Either way, the sonnet became the most famous literary picture of synesthesia and fed the Symbolist idea that the senses answer one another, which Kandinsky carried into painting.
Real synesthetes don't agree with him: for many English speakers with colored letters, A is red, not black, and every person's palette differs. The poem is better read as a dare, binding sounds and colors by imagination, the same kind of bond this app builds by practice.
Swatches
- A · black
- E · white
- I · red
- U · green
- O · blue
Colors
Sources
- Rimbaud, A. (1873). Une saison en enfer, 'Délires II: Alchimie du verbe'.
- Robb, G. (2000). Rimbaud. Picador.
- Wikipedia, 'Arthur Rimbaud' and 'Voyelles'.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.