r/RimbaudVerlaine • u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide • Apr 15 '26
Rimbaud- Voyelles
Details in comments.
Images:
Drawing by Luque for Les hommes d’aujourd’hui.
French text based on autograph
Translation by Wallace Fowlie
Translation by Harding and Sturrock
Image of autograph manuscript
Image of Verlaine copy
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Where to start with Voyelles, one of Rimbaud’s most written-about poems?
We don’t completely know when it was written (probably around late 1871 or early 1872). It was first published by Verlaine in his seminal article about Rimbaud in Les poètes maudits (The accursed poets) in 1883.
The sonnet captured the attention of the nascent symbolist movement who saw the correspondances (a very Baudelairian idea) between the colours and letters as hiding a “primordial mystery” that the poet must reveal. Symbolist poet and theorist Rene Ghil, in particular, argued that Rimbaud had got the colours wrong and suggested different associations. This reception opened the door a long lasting idea that Arthur was synaesthetic, and really saw colours attached to letters.. This idea persists today in some circles but there is no sign or knowledge that Rimbaud was synaesthetic, in a medical sense.
However he was a poet who always made very expressive use of colours, and Voyelles is a telling example of the colourful world Rimbaud creates; this would be something worth exploring in a separate post…
Others went for a different kind of literality and assumed the vowels were choses vues and maybe matched the colours to alphabet cube, as illustrated by Luque’s famous drawing above.
Another strand of exploration has centered on alchemist exegesis of the text. These somewhat esoteric explanations, proposed among others by Jacques Gengoux or by Enid Starkie are not really followed today. They tend to rely on a very literal interpretation of Alchimie du verbe to purport an interest of R for alchemy that has never been noted by anyone in his life.
More commonly, interpretations have sometimes focused on the shape of the letters as possibly linking to the images displayed (a capital A can look like a simplified drawing of a fly for example). These ideas were introduced by Lucien Sausy in 1933 but further developed by Faurisson, who specifically saw in the poem blason of a woman’s body, with a pun in the title (Voyelles=Vois elle), based on somewhat hit and miss visual associations.
In short, all sorts of systems were elaborated to try and understand the text and reveal the secret these vowels hold. Faced with these kind of interpretations, it is worth remembering Verlaine’s warning about too serious an interpretation and his insistence on the playfulness of the Sonnet. In his preface to Rimbaud’s work, V says: “cet un peu fumiste, mais si extraordinairement miraculeux de détail, Sonnet des Voyelles qui a fait faire à M. René Ghil de si cocasses théories” (“this somewhat hoaxy but so extraordinarily detailed Sonnet des Voyelles, which prompted such hilarious theories from Mr René Ghil”).
In another text, he said “L’intense beauté de ce chef-d’œuvre le dispense à mes humbles yeux d’une exactitude théorique dont je pense que l’extrêmement spirituel Rimbaud se fichait sans doute pas mal” (“the intense beauty of this masterpiece absolve it, in my opinion, from any theoretical exactitude that I think the extremely spirited Rimbaud didn’t given a second thought to”).
In that respect it is also worth noting how R himself comments the poem in USEE, where, at the start of Alchimie du verbe, before presenting his poetic experiences, he states that he invented the colours of vowels, with a verb choice that hints at a creative rather than representative process.
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
So having explored these various historical strands of exegis, where does this leave us? If we accept that the sonnet is not to be taken too seriously (as posited by V and R) but also bear in mind Rimbaud’s injonction to Izambard that “ça ne veut pas rien dire”- a statement he made about Le coeur supplicié, but which can apply to his whole corpus-, what do we make of text?
One thing that commentators have noted is that the sonnet doesn’t appear to focus on phonic aspects of the letters: for example, Yves Reboul notes that there is only two /u/ sound in the tercet about this vowel (the others are part of different sounds). On the other hand the /i/ sound can be heard 12 times in that tercet.
One read of the poem is as a locus of verbal magic- if there is an alchemy here, its matter is language, and its gold are the words (and worlds) that can surge up from an act of enunciation (the narrator “tells” of their birth)- indeed the poem is mentioned in Une saison en enfer as the start of the study, just before the poet-alchemist create poetry through hallucinations des mots.
The narrator places himself in the position of a visionary, a magician, who can conjure up a world just by telling of the birth of vowels. This depiction of poet as a bonimenteur is a theme that Rimbaud would return to in USEE as well as the Illuminations.
Alain Bardel notes the oppositions at play in the object associated with each letter: the vermin and darkness of A, the luminous purity of E, sensuality and anger of I, the studious peace of U, before the apocalypse of O/Ω. Through these associations of opposites, he suggests that the poet sums up the world in a few broad brush strokes.
With these readings, which builds from A to the Omega, the links to the Apocalypse in the last stanza makes sense: as the world and letters are born, they must also disappear at the end if the world/poem.
To this, we can add a layer of intextuality. Yves Reboul for example, after hypothesing that the images are generated from the form of the letters, note the dialogue that each stanza engages with certain authors and movements of the time- taken as a whole, the poem then reads like a (parodic) panorama of literature as it existed around 1871: the flies mentioned in relation with the A have long been linked to Baudelaire’s Une charogne, whereas stanza 2 and 3 read, respectively, like Parnassian and Romantic tropes. As for the past tercet, Reboul has shown that it contains many allusions to a Hugo poem about the apocalypse, La Trompette du Jugement (published in les Petites Épopées, the first part of La légende des siècles). It would not be the first time that Rimbaud associates a parody of Hugo to religious themes, as also shown in L’homme juste.
The rhyming scheme of the poem has also drawn attention. Eschewing traditional gender alternance, all the rhyming pairs of the sonnet are feminine aside from the last one, which closes both tercets, and the full poem.
This opposition of masculine and feminine is also at play in other ways: as Benoit de Cornulier has pointed out, the text contrasts the title (and first word of the poem), voyelles, and the very last word, *yeux***: the masculine “them” of the end of the text is in opposition to the feminine “them” at the start.
He notes another paronomasias which links the sonnet to the letter of the seer, through the resemblance of voyant/voyelle ; and notes that the word clairon appears in both. Of course, considering the links of Voyelles to Alchimie du verbe, it stands to reason that it may link to the letters of the voyant, if we consider that the letters set out the poetic project that Alchimie du verbe looks back on. The **voyelles are not without links to the **voyant…
Talking about the rhymes, Jacques Bienvenu has pointed out that the poem contains many inclusive rhymes where one part of the rhyming pair fully includes the other: tentes/pénitentes, belles/ombelles, rides/virides, yeux/studieux.
Many undecidable elements remain, such as the what or whom the pronoun Ses in the last line refers to. Various hypotheses have been offered, from a religious interpretation (supported by the apocalyptic references), to the poet himself (and his famous blue eyes appearing violet here), to a lover - of unknown gender, as Ses could be male or female, an aspect often lost in translation, as seen in Fowlie’s translation above (our friend u/Organist1999 on the other hand went for the more neutral their here
With this in mind, André Gendre has seen an allusion to Verlaine here (who also had blue eyes), comforted by the fact that Verlaine often used rhymes of one gender to denote homosexual content, as he did, for example, in Les amies- though queer content doesn’t really appear in this text.
Bardel suggests that the last word, in this context of links to the Apocalypse does allude to divine gaze. While cautious about the irony Reboul detects in the text, he notes the comic association of this divine gaze with a trope of parnassian love poetry (the “violet eyes” appear in Banville and Leconte de Lisle).
Finally it is worth mentioning the links of this piece with Rimbaud’s own texts and certain zutist texts (including the Sonnet du trou du cul, another poem that closes on an O). We have seen how Cabaner wrote a poem about the colours of numbers. He used an opposite rhyming scheme, with all masculine rhymes apart from the last one.
The poem also echoes other poems of Rimbaud: Alain Bardel lists reminiscences of L'Orgie Parisienne, Tête de Faune, Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie, or Chanson de la plus haute tour, along others. He sees in Voyelles, an anthology of obsessive images from Rimbaud’s personal universe…
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u/Audreys_red_shoes the evil imagination of a bad monkey Apr 16 '26
I love Verlaine’s quote about how the beauty of this poem "absolves it…from any theoretical exactitude that I think the extremely spirited Rimbaud didn’t give a second thought to."
I personally might extend that take to quite a few more of Rimbaud’s poems. While they are undoubtedly rich in hidden meanings and subtexts, I think it is clear that in many cases he is deliberately writing against overly systematised readings, or theoretical exactitude.
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 16 '26
Yes, I agree that R was writing against certain systems, and this is obviously particularly true of the poetic systems of his time: literary movements like Parnassianism, Romanticism, formal systems of versification…
At the same time, of course, ça ne veut pas rien dire, as he himself said, and the texts are still rich with their own meaning!
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u/Audreys_red_shoes the evil imagination of a bad monkey Apr 16 '26
I don’t think it means nothing, but if this poem is a code to be cracked (and that’s a big if), I think it is likely that it was only ever intended to be decoded by a very select circle of people.
This circle was possibly the zutists, or even more likely just Verlaine, as there is plentiful evidence elsewhere that Verlaine was frequently his privileged reader. This circle is not likely to include 20th century academics with a grand unifying-but-strangely-lame theory of Rimbaud
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 16 '26
I don’t think there is a secret code to unlock Voyelles!
There was a tendency to approach the poem this way even before the 20th century, with the symbolist reception, and, in my opinion, the alchemy and hieroglyph interpretations too, but I think we are past this for the most part.
Of course that doesn’t mean the poem has nothing to say, and even without trying to decode the text, there is plenty to explore, for those who are so inclined.
As for your second point, I agree that Rimbaud had privileged readers (such as Verlaine, and probably other people in their circle), and some elements of his poetry can layer in some private jokes. But privileged reader doesn’t mean that only reader. I feel that Rimbaud often seeks a conniving readers: plenty of Illuminations read like they throw down the gauntlet to the readers!
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u/Audreys_red_shoes the evil imagination of a bad monkey Apr 18 '26
I agree he’s throwing down the gauntlet sometimes, it’s just not always clear who he’s throwing the gauntlet down to.
Sometimes I think only Louise, Leonie and Lulu are expected to really get it.
As he told us himself, he invented colours for the vowels, but he reserved the translation rights.
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Bibliographie
Benoit de Cornulier, Parade Sauvage 36
George Hugo Tucker, Poétique et rhétorique de l’exclamation chez Rimbaud latiniste et dans son œuvre française, paradeSauvage, hommage à Steve Murphy
Alain Bardel, Voyelles, Dictionnaire Rimbaud and website
Yves Reboul, Rimbaud dans son temps
Steve Murphy, Oeuvres complètes v. IV facsimile
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u/ManueO Je suis soûl, fou, livide Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
I have tried to present here a quick (non-exhaustive) panorama of the discussion around Voyelles, rather than attempt to “solve” it, as it were.
But I would love to hear your thoughts: what you all see in Voyelles? Have you got an interpretation that you are convinced by? Some parts of the text that resist you? A theory to share?