Semantic Impertinence and Poetic Meaning in Arthur Rimbaud: Color, Syntax, and Synesthetic Deviation

1. Introduction

Poems by Arthur Rimbaud often combine unexpected and semantically unrelated words, which are grammatically correct. Vowels have colours, night is green, perfumes are black, kisses sleep, and eyes are the seas. These are frequently included in general statements about Symbolist letters, visionary poetics, metaphor, or synesthesia. These descriptions highlight important traditions, but the experience of language itself cannot be well theorized. Before a reader can interpret the image, the regularity of the expectation has been disrupted: a color adjective is used to describe an object that does not really have color; a verb is used to describe an action to an incompatible subject; or a genitive phrase is used to suggest a relation that is not provided by conventional usage. This is the starting point of the interpretive power of the line.

This is impertinence in the sense of Jean Cohen, a derogation of the ordinary semantic pertinence in poetic discourse (1966). His structural account continues to be fruitful as it finds poetic effect not in a special poetic vocabulary but in relations among words. Yet, in Cohen's formulation there remain two issues for a modern interpretation of Rimbaud. First, the distinctions between the grammatical locations where incompatibility is found are not sufficient. Secondly, it tends to read “deviation” as a movement towards “metaphor,” while Rimbaud's combinations are often left open, having multiple motives, or not finding a definitive “substitution.” Recent research in cognitive poetics, sensory linguistics, and metaphor studies provides resources for accounting for this novelty, but such research has not often been well-integrated with a study of the micro-semantics of Rimbaud's verse (Jacobs 2015; Semino and Demjén 2017; Winter 2019; Stockwell 2020).

Along with the revival of interest in Rimbaud's work in recent years, the materiality, embodiment, history, and politics of the poems have also been re-evaluated. Formal attention, as exemplified by St. Clair (2018), is, however, a step closer to the poet's body in relation to the historical and intertextual relations, whereas Whidden (2018) highlights the poet's formal audacity and constant experimentation. Hampson (2022) demonstrates how Rimbaud's energy is a resource for further radical poetics. These methods are useful and fruitful in transcending the biographical myth. But exactly how the language procedure leads to a field of possible meanings of an anomalous phrase is, as yet, comparatively underdescribed. Interpretive procedures of their own are not even questioned as a way to make meaning of the poem, as is done in Voyelles, but rather how each vowel colour combination means. (Ginsburgh and Metzidakis 2019)

The aim of this article is to fill this gap by exploring the semantic impertinence as a systematic, classifiable, and context-sensitive aspect of Rimbaud's poetic language. It poses three questions:

(1)

At what levels of the grammar of the language is semantic impertinence found?

(2)

In what ways does the context of the poem do the opposite—how does it transform incompatibility into meaningfulness?

(3)

What is the relation between semantic impertinence and metaphor and literary synesthesia, and how will it be different?

The study offers a three-part typology (adjectival, verbal, and nominal) and four-stage interpretive model (expectation, rupture, contextual activation, provisional reconfiguration). This model builds upon Cohen's insight by describing not only how poetry deviates, but how other grammatical deviations structure reading.

The argument is intentionally low on the headspace of authorial intent. It does not impose any conscious linguistic taxonomy on Rimbaud, nor does it seek to recover all possible meanings of the collocations that are unusual. Rather, it refers to the observable text relations and text interpretive operations that they evoke. The mismatch between the selectional expectations in a conventional combination of a lexical item and the item to which it is combined is called semantic impertinence. Throughout this article, the term ‘renders’ Cohen's French impertinence, and does not mean insolence, rudeness or pragmatic impoliteness. This limitation on terms has eliminated the false variants which have occasionally occurred in translation.

The next sections explain how the concept is related to the concept of deviation, metaphor and synesthesia, and then define the corpus and the analytical procedure. Close readings of a smaller, representative selection of passages for greater depth. The classifications are traceable in a comparative table, and the last synthesis describes the necessity of the retention of the essence of impertinence as a poetic signifying mechanism.

2. Poetic Deviation, Metaphor, and Synesthesia

Probabilistic and semantic expectations for ordinary lexical combination. A dog doesn't usually meow, a night is not usually green, and a dog doesn't usually sleep. There is no difference in the grammaticality of both sequences; each is syntactically regular. The distinction is in the conventional knowledge and selectional fit of words, as well as their sensory/ontological properties. The idea of the signifier and the signified as related, as in Saussure's account (1960), and the focus on meaning in syntactic and discursive structures, as in Greimas and Courtés' (1979) account, are helpful in understanding what is meant when no lexical item signifies alone. Semantic compatibility is also defined as the "standard association" between the lexical units of a linguistic community by Aksan (1999). These expectations are brought to the fore by a deliberate violation of these expectations in a piece of poetry.

Criticism cannot correct foregrounding by deviation. In contrast, cognitive-poetic strategies see unusual language as pointing to something, slowing down readers, and prompting them to adapt and create frames of interpretation (Jacobs 2015; Stockwell 2020). Experimental study of literary metaphor also shows that novelty brings in more semantic integration than just a simple replacement of literal expression (Sun et al. 2022). The inability to write literally is thus a part of the action of Rimbaud's poem. The reader looks in the line, the stanza, the poem, the Symbolist body of work for elements that could drive the conjunction, but it is not always conclusive.

The relationship between metaphor and semantic impertinence is said to be a conventional connection of distant domains, which is present in both. They do not coincide, however, but are complementary. Although it is not always new (Semino and Demjén 2017), a metaphor is typically used to enable a mapping or a transfer from a source to a target. A metaphor usually facilitates some mapping and/or transfer from a source to a target (Gibbs 2017; Semino and Demjén 2017). Cognitive-linguistic analyses also highlight that such mappings rely on both discourse frames and embodied variation, as well as networks of related conceptual structures (Dancygier 2017; Littlemore 2019; Kövecses 2020). The preceding relation, a fact that is not conventional, is semantically impertinent. The impertinent phrase is solved metaphorically, can evoke multiple mappings, and can leave incompatibility as an irreducible effect. So black perfumes can provoke an affective mapping from darkness to corruption, danger, or foulness, but these paraphrases do not exhaust the impact of the collision of the visual color and the odor.

A careful distinction must also be made when it comes to literary synesthesia. The term is applied to expressions that link or transfer qualities between sensory modalities, for example, a sharp sound or a warm colour (Caballero and Paradis 2015; Strik Lievers 2015). Research indicates that such transfers are not infinite, but instead are patterned, albeit with a probabilistic element and cultural variation (Zhao, Huang, and Ahrens 2019). A few researchers do an analysis of linguistic synesthesia as metaphorical mapping (Zhao, Ahrens and Huang 2022), and Winter (2019) warns against all conventional sensory descriptions being either neurological synesthesia or complete metaphors. In recent work, novel synesthetic expressions are also shown to engage with embodiment, and to demand flexible conceptual integration (Zhong, Ahrens and Huang 2023).

In the present analysis, synesthesia is only used for language that involves a crossing of perceptual domains, while semantic impertinence also refers to incompatibilities of sensory and non-sensory domains. Black perfumes is synesthetic and impertinent: the photographic nature of an attribute is applied to the sense of smell, and literal color attribution is transgressed. Green night is unwarranted, but not necessarily a cross-sensory phenomenon; both colour and night are more visual, and the deviation is an unexpected attribution. Although impertinent and personifying, the kiss sleeps is not synesthetic. An expression can thus fall under several categories, as long as each category describes a different kind of operation to be performed on the text. Here, the concept of synesthesia is not used as a blanket term for all the unique visual experiences that are produced by music.

The distinction also helps to understand the meaning of context. Sensory vocabulary is a communicative tool that allows speakers to share their perceptual experiences, whose meanings, however, rely on conventional patterns and on the construal of the situation (Caballero and Paradis 2023). Rimbaud takes advantage of that dependency. The out-of-place word isn't even just normalised by the context; it triggers features elsewhere in the poem—in a series of colors, in marine imagery, in the shape of the body, in the recurrence of phonemes, in mythology, in affect and motion. The semantic mismatch remains even though it is becoming more interpretable. Impertinence is thus not a lack of meaning, but a redirection, a design of delay, and reallocation of meaning.

3. Materials and Methods

The method in this study is qualitative, with the techniques used in this study being close reading and stylistic and semiotic analysis. The main text is Rimbaud's Poésies (1993 ed.), verified in comparison with the French version of the poems. The main group of books in the core corpus are: Voyelles, Le Bateau ivre, Larme, L’étoile a pleuré rose…, Tête de Faune, and Les Premières Communions. The poems were carefully chosen because they include some tightly packed, formally diverse examples of semantic mismatch, and also because they allow comparisons to be made between adjective–noun, subject–verb, verb–complement, and nominal relations. Supporting examples from Soleil et Chair, Ma Bohème, Le Buffet, Le Cœur volé, Accroupissements and Ce qu'on dit au poète à propos de fleurs are included only to test and refine the typology.

The unit of analysis is the smallest grammatical construction in which there is an ambiguity of conventional semantic expectations. An expression was added when it fulfilled three conditions:

(1)

it is syntactically interpretable in French

(2)

it has its selectional, sensory, animacy, transitivity, or relational incompatibility

(3)

the context of the surrounding poem offers material that prompts a nonliteral reconstruction.

Only if it was rare vocabulary, historical usage, a grammatical error, or if it was already lexicalized was it included.

The process of analysis was done in four steps. First, a baseline was set, based on standard lexical and world knowledge; for example, odors do not literally have a visible color. Second, the grammatical position of the rupture was determined as adjectival, verbal, or nominal. Adjectival, verbal, and nominal impertinences all involve an inappropriate relation or the use of an inappropriate term, but adjectival impertinence is inappropriate attribution, verbal impertinence is inappropriate agency, animacy, transitivity, or color, and nominal impertinence is inappropriate genitive or appositional relation without a conventional possessive or part-whole basis. Third, any secondary process was noted, such as metaphor, personification, synesthesia, metonymy, or spatial transfer. Fourth, the local and poem-level context was analyzed to find out what features make the expression more or less intelligible at the local level and the general level of the poem.

The categories refer not to rhetorical figures, but to the most important rhetorical place. A line can also be composed of more than one operation, as when an inanimate object is responsible for a bodily action, and a color complement comes after the verb in L'étoile a pleuré rose. So, classification starts out with syntax and then documents parallel interpretive processes. The analysis is not based on a frequency count nor does it assert statistical representativeness. It is meant to be analytically transferable – the criteria should be used by other readers to test the categories to other poems, editions, and languages.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations in French are followed by an English translation of the author. The translations do not normalize the semantic, syntactic, and grammatical anomaly sectioned off in the subtitle, so as not to "normalize" it without conscious awareness. Only when the translation choices he or she has made are relevant to the work under consideration are published translations and renderings of work in Turkish cited. The policy will guarantee proper attribution and language markers.

Table 1. Analytical typology of representative semantic impertinences.

Poem	Expression	Primary type	Violated expectation	Overlapping process	Interpretive effect
Voyelles	A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu	Adjectival	Letters/vowels receive visible colors	Synesthesia; iconic and associative mapping	Launches a poem-wide network linking graphemes, sound, bodies, affect, and scenes
Le Bateau ivre	la nuit verte	Adjectival	Night is assigned an unexpected hue	Chromatic defamiliarization	Makes the perceptual world unstable and transfers marine or vegetal color into temporality
Le Bateau ivre	des noirs parfums	Adjectival	Odor is assigned visual color	Literary synesthesia; affective metaphor	Condenses smell, darkness, danger, and decay without reducing them to one paraphrase
Larme	un brouillard d’après-midi tiède et vert	Adjectival	Time/atmosphere receives temperature and color	Sensory layering; spatial transfer	Distributes the surrounding vegetation across the afternoon scene
L’étoile a pleuré rose…	L’étoile a pleuré rose	Verbal	An inanimate subject weeps; color functions resultatively	Personification; sensory fusion	Converts cosmic light into bodily secretion, color, and intimacy
Tête de Faune	le baiser dort	Verbal	An abstract event becomes an animate sleeper	Personification; metaphor	Suspends touch within the foliage and turns absence into latent presence
Les Premières Communions	le sommeil bleu des rideaux	Nominal	Curtains possess sleep; sleep bears color	Personification; chromatic transfer	Fuses room, body, moonlight, and dream in one nested construction
Le Bateau ivre	les yeux des mers	Nominal	Seas possess eyes without a fixed referent	Personification; metaphor	Invites waves, gleams, openings, and reciprocal vision as competing readings
Le Bateau ivre	la carcasse ivre d’eau	Nominal	A hull/carcass becomes intoxicated by water	Embodied metaphor	Makes immersion an altered bodily state and destabilizes boat/speaker identity

Source: expressions from Rimbaud (1993). The table records the dominant grammatical locus. Secondary processes overlap, and interpretations remain constrained but provisional.

Table 1. Analytical typology of representative semantic impertinences.

Poem	Expression	Primary type	Violated expectation	Overlapping process	Interpretive effect
Voyelles	A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu	Adjectival	Letters/vowels receive visible colors	Synesthesia; iconic and associative mapping	Launches a poem-wide network linking graphemes, sound, bodies, affect, and scenes
Le Bateau ivre	la nuit verte	Adjectival	Night is assigned an unexpected hue	Chromatic defamiliarization	Makes the perceptual world unstable and transfers marine or vegetal color into temporality
Le Bateau ivre	des noirs parfums	Adjectival	Odor is assigned visual color	Literary synesthesia; affective metaphor	Condenses smell, darkness, danger, and decay without reducing them to one paraphrase
Larme	un brouillard d’après-midi tiède et vert	Adjectival	Time/atmosphere receives temperature and color	Sensory layering; spatial transfer	Distributes the surrounding vegetation across the afternoon scene
L’étoile a pleuré rose…	L’étoile a pleuré rose	Verbal	An inanimate subject weeps; color functions resultatively	Personification; sensory fusion	Converts cosmic light into bodily secretion, color, and intimacy
Tête de Faune	le baiser dort	Verbal	An abstract event becomes an animate sleeper	Personification; metaphor	Suspends touch within the foliage and turns absence into latent presence
Les Premières Communions	le sommeil bleu des rideaux	Nominal	Curtains possess sleep; sleep bears color	Personification; chromatic transfer	Fuses room, body, moonlight, and dream in one nested construction
Le Bateau ivre	les yeux des mers	Nominal	Seas possess eyes without a fixed referent	Personification; metaphor	Invites waves, gleams, openings, and reciprocal vision as competing readings
Le Bateau ivre	la carcasse ivre d’eau	Nominal	A hull/carcass becomes intoxicated by water	Embodied metaphor	Makes immersion an altered bodily state and destabilizes boat/speaker identity

Source: expressions from Rimbaud (1993). The table records the dominant grammatical locus. Secondary processes overlap, and interpretations remain constrained but provisional.

4. Adjectival Impertinence: Color Beyond Visible Objects

The word color is used in what seems to be a stable perceptual reference, which makes it the most obvious impertinence in the adjectival constructions in which Rimbaud uses it. Voyelles starts by destroying that "stability": “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles” (“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels”; Rimbaud 1993, 88). The opening is not just a list of readily identifiable source and target domain metaphors. The vowel is both a category of sounds, a written sign, a shape, and a sequence. This fleeting thing brings color to this instability, which then gives the rest of the sonnet some potential motivations in the form of flies, whiteness, blood, seas, cosmic sound, and violet eyes.

The strength of the poem isn't in decoding a code but in the observation of each color-letter pairing adding to the body of the poem. In the black A, the expansion of the form is described by “corset velu des mouches éclatantes” (“hairy corset of glittering flies”), where the form is held and expanded by the interplay of shape, darkness, enclosure, and swarming movement. Red I is blood, green U is seas and cycles, blue O is the resonance, a shape akin to an Omega, and violet gaze. The pairings are based on iconic shape, phonetic suggestion, affective symbolism, and sensory correspondence, but none of these principles prevails in all five of the poems. Ginsburgh and Metzidakis (2019) also stress the instability of the interpretation of the basis of the poem (vowels versus colors). But a "productive" instability is explained by semantic impertinence, in the sense that the adjective is not just a description of a property; it forces the noun to be many different kinds of thing simultaneously.

This account also makes the distinction between poetic synesthesia and the description of a neural color-hearing. Voyelles establishes correspondences between the modes (and semiotic fields), but it is not necessary to make a biographical diagnosis from the pieces of text. The reader is presented with a language structure whose words are scattered throughout the poem. Sensory-linguistically, the match-ups are highly unusual, and partially diverge from the usual orientation preferences (Strik Lievers 2015; Zhao, Ahrens, and Huang 2022). They serve the literary purpose of making the perception available as an invented relation and not the documentation of a stable private association.

Le Bateau ivre makes the color of signs infiltrate environments and non-visible sensations. The word green is used to modify the word night in “J’ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies.” (I dreamed the night green, dazzled snows; Rimbaud 1993, 85). Though night is visually apprehended, the expression does not have the characteristics of a cross-modal expression, but it does contradict the conventional dark or black night. The surroundings of the poem are full of sea plants, phosphorescence, waves, and shaky horizons. Green thus shifts from water and plant life to temporal atmosphere. The word does not call on the reader to substitute a more abstract interpretation for green. It lets night become permeable to the colours of the world of the traveller.

The collision between senses is greater in “des noirs parfums” (“black perfumes”). “Perfume is a part of 'smell'; black is a part of 'vision'. Simultaneity of perceptual fields is lost when there is a metaphorical paraphrase, as in the case of foul, ominous, corrupt, or deathly odors. Black isn't necessarily evil. It enhances the perception of the smell of an atmosphere and affect, giving it a darkening effect. The term is a literary synesthetic and also is semantically impertinent. The former is the identification of the sensory crossing; the latter, the incompatibility that makes the crossing perceptually and interpretatively salient.

Larme is a transfer that is more contextually motivated: “Par un brouillard d’après-midi tiède et vert” (“Through a warm and green afternoon mist”; Rimbaud 1993, 96). The syntax layers temperature and color on the mist and afternoon. The preceding hazel woods provide a source of green, and the warmth is both in the weather and in the embodied sensation. In a metonymic way, color permeates into the atmosphere and time, from vegetation. Vert is a decorative epithet that recodes the spatial relations of the scene: afternoon, mist, body, foliage are elements of one perceptual field. This is the contextual activation stage of the model proposed. The first anomaly does not get eliminated from the image; rather, the surrounding images include features that are provisionally added to the phrase.

In these poems, color terms are used for three operations. They strip away from their proper owners, carry affective/cultural baggage, and weave dispersed elements into a sensory configuration. The impertinence is systematic, the adjective being the glue that connects lexical incompatibility with the level of coherence of the poem. It's not random, because there are readings possible, but because there aren't a bunch of literal equivalents to it, it's poetic.

5. Verbal Impertinence: Agency, Transitivity, and Result

The impertinence of the word is a problem in the expectations with regard to what sorts of things are capable of acting, changing, and receiving particular complements. L'étoile a pleuré rose / au cœur de tes oreilles, / L'infini roulé blanc de ta nuque / à tes reins; / La mer a perlé russet à tes mammes vermeilles, / Et l'homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain” (Léopold, Rimbaud 1993, 88). The sequence assigns parallel predicates (both bodily and material) to cosmic, spatial, marine and human elements, with color added to each.

The star “wept pink” is unusual for a number of reasons. A star cannot really tear; pleurer is used in a structure that makes colour resemble the effect or material of tears; and tears come at the “heart” of ears, adding sight, interiority of the body, and hearing. The color complement cannot be explained as personification, nor as the serial grammar of the stanza. But synesthesia is not the only reason for the re-distribution of agency. The loony, loony senselessness of the line is grammatical: verb becomes a means of distributing colour, of letting light pour from subject to body, of letting distance pour from body to subject.

There are parallel clauses to keep the first line from becoming a trite pathetic fallacy. White is Infinity, the sea beads or pearls are russet, and man is black. In each clause, an event is transformed into a chromatic production. The colours are not intrinsic but the result of action; the addressee's body is the surface that is the meeting point of cosmic and human processes. This density is shed light upon by St. Clair's (2018) description of the Rimbaldian body as a place where material and historical relationships converge. In this place, the body is not a stable reference to which metaphors are given, but rather it is built by the impossible transfers of the verbs.

Incompatibility is an even subtler but more important one in Tête de Faune: “De fleurs splendides où le baiser dort” (“with splendid flowers where the kiss sleeps”; Rimbaud 1993, 51). Conventionally, Dormir chooses an animate topic. A sleeper is not an act or an event; it's Baiser. Personification provides a first description, but the effect of the context alters it. The faun has escaped, the laughter is still shaking in the leaves, and the forest's golden kiss is collecting itself. The absent encounter is latent in foliage when asleep. The verb makes completed contact into a suspended presence, sensuality into concealment, and the immediate alternation between appearance and disappearance in the poem.

This is not an isolated technique – supporting examples demonstrate this. In Ma Bohème, stars seem to play a discreet tune; in Le Buffet, scents drift or roam like old wine; in Le Cœur volé, the heart is let down; it's brought down to the base of the sternum. Each verb brings in a "material behavior" from another domain. The expressions that emerge are metaphorically motivated by glitter, diffusion, motion in the liquid, or bodily abjection, but the effect of the expression relies on the resistance of the verb towards the designated subject. If the verb is replaced with another one semantically appropriate, it's not simply going to clarify the statement; it's going to remove the sensory and affective labor on the reader.

Thereby, the verbality impertinence gives dynamism to relation. Adjectival impertinence conveys a property; verbal impertinence a reorganisation of agency, causation and change. It can come alive with abstractions, translate sensations into materialization, or give color as a result. The grammatical puzzle is a model of poetic change, not just similarity between entities, but their acquisition of capacities.

6. Nominal Impertinence: Impossible Possession and Relational Density

The most obvious sign of nominal impertinence is found in the genitive and/or possessive constructions, which claim an unusual relationship between entities. Les Premières Communions contains two impossible elements: “le sommeil bleu des rideaux illuminés” (“the blue sleep of the illuminated curtains”; Rimbaud 1993, 73). Blue is the color of sleep, and Curtains have sleep. It is inspired by a moonlit fabric, the sleeping room, or the girl's state expressed in the surroundings. However, none of the grammatical paraphrases—the blue curtains in the sleeping room, blue light seen when sleeping, or closed eyelids, comparable to blue curtains—has the tightness of the original. These relations are made simultaneous by taking them to be nominal constructions.

The stanza continues this density of relation by whiteness, Sunday candor, red dreaming, bleeding. Colour flows in and out of window, curtains, moral-religious abstraction, dream and body. The Sunday candors are related to innocence or whiteness, whereas the last red dream turns into literal blood. The use of the expression “blue sleep of the curtains” is not an isolated luxury, as it acts as a mediator of a set of processes in which interior space and embodied experience could exchange properties. The openness of the reading is limited by the religious and chromatic effects, but the possessive relation is left deliberately ambiguous.

Le Bateau ivre is constantly creating such connections. In “Les yeux des mers” (“the eyes of the seas”): Seas are given sight. The image is motivated by waves, whirlpools, reflective gleams, or openings, and there is no fixed anatomical correspondence for the plural genitive. Most importantly, eyes add to this reciprocal perception: the boat speaker doesn't just look at the sea; the sea looks back. In a poem that has an agent, a witness, an exposed object as its speaking voice, this shift in point of view is important.

In the same poem (la carcasse ivre d’eau), the boat, the body, and intoxication all coalesce into one. The bone structure of an animal, of a human being, or of a ship is called carcares, and when a man becomes a skeleton, or when a man's frame is made into a ship's hull, he is called carcares or d'eau. The construction makes use of lexical polysemy, not just for decoration of the boat. The nominal phrase provides a material grammar for the instability of the “I” as it becomes increasingly less human and/or mechanical in the poem. It is particularly apt, as Whidden (2018) points out, that Rimbaud's identity is continually shifting through the syntax of relation.

The difference between nominal impertinence and adjectival impertinence is that in the former, the question is not one concerning a property; it is one concerning a kind of relation that can connect two entities. Even in everyday speech, genitives and appositions are semantically underspecified; Rimbaud thereby exacerbates that underspecification by pairing together domains without a traditional ‘ownership’, ‘part-whole ', ‘cause', ‘place' relation. Readers interact with the text and create multiple relations. The density is increased as no one has to exclude others from the poem.

The three categories do not have to be mutually exclusive. A nominal relation is present at the highest syntactic level of “blue sleep of the curtains”, and there is an adjectival relation in the first part of the second. The nominal relation is achieved at the higher syntactic level in “blue sleep of the curtains”, and a predicative attribution in the first part of the second. The criteria for classification are not to put every one of the phrases in one box, but rather to detect the source of the initial compositional pressure. This grammatical focus facilitates the interpretive process and helps to make it more explicit and comparable from poem to poem.

7. From Rupture to Poetic Signification

The analyses indicate a four-stage model. First, there is the activation of a conventional expectation: colours change visible things, sleep is a property of animate things, and it is an expectation familiar to the concept of possession that it has a recognizable relation. Secondly, it breaks that expectation. Thirdly, the reader performs "contextual features" such as neighbouring images, sound patterns, bodily schemas, intertexts, genre conventions, and cultural associations. Thirdly, these features result in a provisional reconfiguration in which the phrase is meaningful but not, literally, ordinary.

This model is a revision of two reductive models. According to one interpretation, deviant language is interpreted as 'semantic nonsense' that is acceptable due to poetic license. Rimbaud's repetitions, however, indicate that incompatibility is structured at specifiable grammatical locations and is limited by local networks. In another telling, each and every oddity becomes instantaneously metaphor. Metaphor is one component of contextual reconfiguration, but it does not necessarily run the entire gamut of construction. Black perfumes sustain sensory crossing after an affective mapping is recognized; the eyes of the seas support several relations; the star wept pink personifies, resultative color and bodily address.

The relation-level mechanism is thus the most adequate one to explain semantic impertinence. This comes before the judgment to describe an expression as metaphorical (or as metaphor), synesthetic (or as synaesthesia), personifying (or as persona), or metonymic (or as metonymy). It gives reason for requesting interpretation; the lexical units don't make conventional composition. The secondary labels describe resources employed to try to resolve the issue. Beyond Rimbaud, this distinction is helpful because it helps to differentiate between a linguistic trigger and the various rhetorical and cognitive reactions that ensue.

This method also does not go so far as to overstate claims of universalism. Embodiment, conventional language and culture (Caballero and Paradis 2015; Winter 2019; Caballero and Paradis 2023) all impact sensory mappings. The anomaly felt by a contemporary reader does not accurately reflect that of a nineteenth-century French reader, and translations are expected to either preserve or normalize the anomaly. The present analysis thus relies upon each claim being grounded in the French construction and is based on the assumption that the interpretations are not necessarily the 'real' meanings of the text, but possibilities that are read given those in the construction. Other research involves making a comparison between editions and translations, a test of the typology across the Illuminations, or a combination of close reading and corpus evidence on historical collocational norms.

But the recurrence is evident in Rimbaud's poetry. Color becomes a principle to guide the visual surface, and is also a principle to guide the coordination of signs, odors, time, and abstraction. Verbs can give stars, kisses, odors and hearts unusual agencies or material behaviors. Nominal phrases make impossible possessions and part-whole relations that deepen perspective. These don't just happen to be three disparate collections of oddities. They comprise a poetics in which the non-combination of ordinary combination sets off the process of meaning-making.

8. Conclusions

This article has recaptivated the importunate discussion in a formal, even literal way that is not synonymous with poetic strangeness but rather a careful description of a semantic incompatibility. It builds upon Cohen and introduces the notions of cognitive poetics, sensory linguistics, and metaphor studies, and has demonstrated that Rimbaud's deviations are described in three grammatical levels. In adjectival impertinence, properties (usually colors) are attributed to things that are neither properties nor colored. Verbal impertinence remodels animacy, agency, transitivity, and result. The nominal impertinence creates possessive, genitive, or appositional relations which conventional language doesn't provide.

The first main result is that it is not accidental but systematic in Rimbaud that words are semantically incompatible. Recurrent grammatical patterns direct the attention of the reader and connect the disruption of the local to the configurations of the poem. The second is that incompatibility doesn't get erased; it becomes provisional poetic signification through the activation of sensory, embodied, formal, and intertextual associations. The third is that there is a relationship between semantic impertinence and metaphor and synesthesia, but that they are not the same thing. It identifies the break in the composition, which is resolved by metaphorical mapping, cross-sensory transfer, personification, metonymy, or multiple processes.

That's what that contribution is: with the proposed typology and four-stage model, the expectation transitions to rupture, to contextual activation and to reconfiguration. Voyelles makes the incompatibility of vowel and colour an expanding system of sign, sound, body and affect; Le Bateau ivre makes the incompatibility of chromatic and nominal re-organise the environment and the identity; Larme re-distributes the landscape over time and atmosphere; L’étoile a pleuré rose… makes words imbued with colour and bodily contact; and Tête de Faune preserves touch as a sleeping, latent event. In the following cases, the semantic resistance is not a barrier in front of the meaning. It is the means by which poetic significance is created.