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Rimbaud's "Voyelles" (1871)

A teenage poet's sonnet that gives each vowel a color, and the most famous poem about seeing sounds.

Written
By September 1871
Published
Lutèce, October 1883
Form
Sonnet in alexandrines

'Voyelles' ('Vowels') is a sonnet Arthur Rimbaud wrote by September 1871, before his 17th birthday. It opens: “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,” that is, A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue. Each vowel then unfolds into images of its color: black flies buzzing round a stench; white mists, tents and glaciers; red spat blood and laughing lips; rippling green seas; and for O, a trumpet, silences and a violet ray of light from someone's eyes.

The order is A E I U O, not the usual A E I O U, so the poem ends on O as Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Rimbaud wrote it in the year he declared that a poet must become a 'seer' by deranging all the senses. It wasn't published until 1883, twelve years after Rimbaud wrote it, when his former lover Paul Verlaine printed it in the review Lutèce.

Readers have hunted for the key ever since: a childhood alphabet book or colored letter blocks, occult and alchemical reading, hidden erotic imagery, or no system at all. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss read it as a structure of paired oppositions. Rimbaud himself, two years later, wrote in the 'Alchemy of the Word' section of A Season in Hell that he had invented the color of the vowels (see alchemy).

Is it synesthesia? There's no evidence Rimbaud had it, and his colors don't match what synesthetes typically report, for whom A is often red. But 'Voyelles' became the emblem of the Symbolist dream that the senses answer one another, a dream Kandinsky carried into painting in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

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Colors

Sources

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