Arts & Culture
Symbolist Poetry’s Reliance on Synesthesia Imagery
Quick fact
Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote a sonnet where vowels are assigned colors: 'A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.' This is a classic example of synesthesia imagery in Symbolist poetry.
Why this is interesting
Imagine hearing a symphony while tasting a ripe peach—and then writing a poem that makes someone else 'taste' the music. Symbolist poets turned this sensory mash-up into a core poetic strategy.
Read the full explanation
Understanding Symbolist Poetry’s Reliance on Synesthesia Imagery
When you read a Symbolist poem, you might encounter a line like 'the azure of my tears' or 'a crimson silence.' At first, this seems like a strange mix of senses. In our everyday language, we keep the senses separate: we say 'loud noise' (hearing) and 'bright light' (sight). Synesthesia, in poetry, is the deliberate blending of these sensory channels—describing one sense in terms of another. It's like a sound having a color, a scent having a texture, or an emotion having a taste. Why would poets do this? The Symbolists, writing in the late 1800s, were frustrated with the limits of language. They believed that ordinary words could only describe the surface of things, but the deeper, spiritual reality was mysterious and elusive. To capture this 'other world,' they turned to synesthesia as a way to suggest it. By merging senses, they created images that are not literal but are more suggestive and emotionally charged. For example, instead of saying 'the night is silent,' a Symbolist might say 'the night is a violet heavy with perfume.' This makes the reader feel the night rather than just see it. The technique works because our senses are more interconnected than we often realize. In reality, we don't experience the world in neat, separate boxes. The smell of rain and the sound of thunder are often experienced together, and our emotional memories can fuse them. Symbolist poetry magnifies this natural blending to create a powerful, focused effect. The goal is not to accurately describe a scene, but to evoke a feeling, a mood, or an intuition about something beyond the physical world. The reader is invited to let the imagery wash over them, to sense the poem's atmosphere rather than to logically decode it.
A deeper explanation
The underlying mechanism of Symbolist synesthesia lies in the belief in 'correspondences,' a concept articulated by Charles Baudelaire in his famous poem 'Correspondances.' Baudelaire proposed that nature is a forest of symbols, where the material world (colors, sounds, perfumes) corresponds to a deeper spiritual reality. These correspondences link the senses to each other and to abstract ideas or emotions. For example, a perfume can be 'fresh as the flesh of a child' and 'sweet as oboes,' creating a chain that connects scent to touch and sound, ultimately leading to an ecstatic unity of experience. For the Symbolists, the sensory world was not an end in itself but a gateway. They believed that the poet’s role was to decode these correspondences and reveal the hidden unity beneath the surface. Synesthesia was the perfect tool for this because it dissolves the boundaries between the senses, mirroring the dissolution of boundaries between the material and the spiritual. It is a way to express the ineffable—feelings and states of being that are too complex, too fleeting, or too profound for direct statement. Moreover, Symbolists like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine used synesthesia as a form of rebellion against the previous literary movements of Realism and Parnassianism, which focused on objective description and precise imagery. Synesthesia deliberately breaks with objective accuracy, prioritizing subjective impression and emotional resonance. Rimbaud’s 'color of vowels' is a systematic, almost programmatic use of synesthesia: he assigns a color to each vowel, not based on any objective rule, but to explore the sound-color correspondences within himself. This systematization suggests that synesthesia could be a deliberate compositional technique, a way to generate new poetic images and meanings that are not available in normal language. As a result, Symbolist synesthesia became a model for modernists and later avant-garde movements—Surrealism in particular—who continued to explore the subconscious and the irrational. The technique also influenced the other arts, most notably painting (e.g., the abstract color symphonies of Kandinsky) and music (e.g., Scriabin's color-coded piano). It represents a fundamental shift in the purpose of art: from mirroring the world to creating a subjective, sensory reality.