Poetry: Vowels

Overview
"Voyelles" ("Vowels"), written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud, is a compact sonnet that announces a radical reimagining of language by assigning colors and symbolic resonances to the five vowels. The poem opens with the astonishing assertion "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles," a single line that sets the tone for a sequence of dense, enigmatic images. Rimbaud proceeds to elaborate each vowel through startling metaphors that collapse sensory categories and invite multiple, sometimes contradictory, readings.
More than a mere catalogue of associations, "Voyelles" functions as a manifesto of poetic perception: letters become living agents, colors become voices, and perception itself is destabilized. The poem resists easy paraphrase, offering instead a compact network of synesthetic correspondences that continues to provoke curiosity and debate.

Color and Sound
The literal mapping of vowels to colors is the poem's most memorable move. "A" is paired with black, "E" with white, "I" with red, "U" with green, and "O" with blue. These pairings are not isolated labels but the starting points for layered symbolics: each vowel's color sets up a tonal field that Rimbaud elaborates through imagery invoking light and darkness, sensuality and violence, landscape and body.
The synesthetic device, blending of auditory and visual senses, does more than create picturesque effects; it reconfigures the reader's sensory expectations. Hearing and seeing become entangled, so that a vowel's phonetic quality seems to demand a chromatic aura. That entanglement underscores Rimbaud's interest in making language do what it ordinarily cannot: to speak through color and to color through speech.

Imagery and Symbolism
Each vowel is given a brief but rich portrait that fuses mythic, bodily, and natural elements. The black "A" opens as a primal presence, associated with darkness, grief, and perhaps the subterranean or chthonic. The white "E" evokes ivory, celestial or spectral light, and an austere luminosity that can read as purity or death. The red "I" appears as a sharp, possibly sanguine force tied to the throat and the act of speaking, while the green "U" brings vegetal and nocturnal intimations, sinuous, fecund, and quietly erotic. The blue "O" rounds the sequence into a horizon of water and melancholy, a vast openness that both attracts and contains.
Rimbaud layers unexpected metaphors, pearls, flames, moons, and tides, so that each vowel functions as a nexus rather than a single symbol. Contradictions are deliberate: a vowel can be both bodily and cosmic, sweet and violent, tender and maiming. The resulting imagery resists allegorical reduction and rewards close, repeated reading.

Form and Technique
Structured as a sonnet, "Voyelles" employs a traditional form to deliver radically modern content. The tight fourteen-line shape intensifies the compression of images and forces sharp juxtapositions. Rimbaud's language is concise, often elliptical, with a music that comes as much from consonant clusters and vowel colors as from meter. Soundplay, assonance, alliteration, and rhythmic tension, amplifies the synesthetic project, making the reader attend to how language feels when vocalized.
The sonnet's rhetorical economy leaves deliberate gaps. Transitions between vowel portraits are abrupt, and the connective tissue is rhythmic and imagistic rather than narrative, pushing readers to assemble relationships among the parts.

Themes and Interpretation
Central themes include the autonomy of language, the possibility of new senses, and the poet as visionary mediator. Rimbaud treats letters as elemental forces that precede and shape meaning, suggesting a world where language and perception co-create reality. The poem also explores oppositions, light/dark, sight/sound, body/landscape, and refuses to settle them, instead proposing a fluid, polymorphous experience of sense.
Interpretations vary widely: some read the sonnet as a synesthetic exercise, others as a coded personal symbolism, and still others as an experiment in poetic alchemy. The ambiguity is part of the poem's power; it invites multiple, sometimes conflicting responses rather than a definitive gloss.

Legacy
"Voyelles" looms large in discussions of Symbolism and modernist poetics. Its bold synesthesia influenced later poets and artists who sought to dissolve boundaries between senses and reinvent the expressive potential of language. The poem also sparked enduring scholarly debate over the stability of its correspondences and the intentions behind them, keeping Rimbaud's youthful audacity alive as a touchstone for experiments in sound, color, and meaning.