Synaesthesia

The word ‘synaesthesia’ has been derived from a Greek word meaning ‘perceiving together’. It means concurrent appeal to more than one senses. J.A. Cuddon defines it as the “response through several senses to the stimulation of one”. It is also sometimes called ‘sense transfer’ or ‘sense analogy’ – as M.H. Abrams too has termed it as description of one sense through another; for instance, colour is attributed to sound, sound to odour, odour to colour.
Synaesthetic imagery was first used by Jules Millet in 1892 in his thesis on Auditon Coloree. Baudelaire made us of this imagery in his sonnet ‘Correspondances’ and ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’. Rimbaud in his poem ‘Voyelles’ assigned a colour to each vowel sound. This imagery was especially used by the Romantic poets and later by French symbolists.
Keats in his odes makes full use of this type of imagery. For instance, in his Ode ‘To Nightingale’ he writes:

“Tasting of Flora and the country green
Provencal song, dance and mirth”

Keats here refers to the tasting of sight, colour, sound, motion and heat. About these lines, Fogle is of the view: ‘Synaesthetic imagery is at its highest’.

Shelley too, using synaesthetic imagery in his poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’ writes:

“Of music so delicate, soft and intense
It was felt like an odour within the sense.”

This imagery was also used by poets like Aeschylus, Donne, Crashaw and Horace.