(''The Drunken Boat'') is a

Symbolist Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: *Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea Arts *Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea ** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...

poem written in the summer of 1871 by French poet

Arthur Rimbaud Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (, ; ; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he s ...

, then aged sixteen. The poem, one-hundred lines long, with four alexandrines per each of its twenty-five

quatrain A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four Line (poetry), lines. Existing in a variety of forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India ...

s, describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism. It is unanimously considered to be one of the paragons of the genre, and a significant influence on modern poetry.

Background

Rimbaud, then aged 16, wrote the poem in the summer of 1871 at his childhood home in Charleville in Northern France. Rimbaud included the poem in a letter he sent to

Paul Verlaine Paul-Marie Verlaine ( ; ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolism (movement), Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the ''fin de siècle'' ...

in September 1871 to introduce himself to Verlaine. Shortly afterwards, he joined Verlaine in Paris and became his lover. Rimbaud and Verlaine had a stormy affair. In Brussels in July 1873, in a drunken, jealous rage, Verlaine fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. Rimbaud was inspired to write the poem after reading

Charles Baudelaire Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics ...

's volume of

French poetry French poetry () is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone literature, Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France. French prosody and poetics The modern French language does not ...

Les Fleurs du mal ''Les Fleurs du mal'' (; ) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. ''Les Fleurs du mal'' includes nearly all Baudelaire's poetry, written from 1840 until his death in August 1867. First published in 1857, it was important in the ...

'' and

Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraor ...

's 1870 novel ''

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'' () is a science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may inclu ...

'', which had recently been published in book form, and which is known to have been the source of many of the poem's allusions and images. Another Verne novel, ''

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras ''The Adventures of Captain Hatteras'' () is an 1866 adventure novel by Jules Verne in two parts: ''The English at the North Pole'' () and ''The Desert of Ice'' (). The novel was published for the first time in 1864 as a serial in the French maga ...

'', was likely an additional source of inspiration.

Summary

The poem is arranged in a series of 25

alexandrine Alexandrine is a name used for several distinct types of verse line with related metrical structures, most of which are ultimately derived from the classical French alexandrine. The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French '' Ro ...

quatrains A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines. Existing in a variety of forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India, Ancient Gree ...

with an ''a/b/a/b'' rhyme-scheme. It is woven around the delirious visions of the eponymous boat, swamped and lost at sea. It was considered revolutionary in its use of imagery and symbolism. One of the longest and perhaps best poems in Rimbaud's œuvre, it opens with the following quatrain: Rimbaud biographer

Enid Starkie Enid Mary Starkie CBE (18 August 1897 – 21 April 1970), was an Irish literary critic, known for her biographical works on French poets. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Lecturer and then Reader in the University. Early ...

describes the poem as an anthology of memorable images and lines. The voice is that of the drunken boat itself. The boat tells of becoming filled with water, thus "drunk". Sinking through the sea, the boat describes a journey of varied experience that includes sights of the purest and most transcendent (, "the yellow-blue alarum of phosphors singing") and at the same time of the most repellent (, "nets where a whole Leviathan was rotting"). The marriage of exaltation and debasement, the synesthesia, and the mounting astonishment make this hundred-line poem the fulfillment of Rimbaud's youthful poetic theory that the poet becomes a seer, a vatic being, through the disordering of the senses. To these attractions are added alexandrines of immediate aural appeal: ("fermenting the bitter blushes of love"). The boat's (and reader's) mounting astonishment reaches its high point in lines 87–88: ("Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself / a million golden birds, o future Strength?"''Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works'', translated by Paul Schmidt) Afterwards, the vision is lost and the spell breaks. The speaker, still a boat, wishes for death (, "O that my keel would break! O that I would go to the sea!"). The grandiose aspirations have deceived, leaving exhaustion and the sense of imprisonment. remains one of the gems of

and of Rimbaud's poetic output.

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...

translated it to Russian in 1928. French poet-composer

Léo Ferré Léo Ferré (; 24 August 1916 – 14 July 1993) was a Monégasque poet and composer, and a dynamic and controversial live performer. He released some forty albums over this period, composing the music and the majority of the lyrics. He released ...

set it to music and sang it in the album (1982).

In other media

* French singer-songwriter

set the poem into music and recorded the song in his 1982 triple LP . He used two first quatrains as a chorus repeated seven times, leading to a thirteen-minute-long song. *

The Pogues The Pogues are an English Celtic punk band founded in King's Cross, London, in 1982, by Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy and Jem Finer. Originally named Pogue Mahone—an anglicisation of the Irish language, Irish phrase :wikt:póg mo thóin, ''p� ...

recorded a song called "Drunken Boat" for their 1993 album '' Waiting for Herb''. It has similar themes to the poem, and its chorus borrows from the poem's penultimate stanza. *

Cordwainer Smith Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966), known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith, was an American author of science fiction. He was an officer in the US Army, a noted scholar of East Asia, and an expert in psycholo ...

wrote a

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

story called "Drunkboat", whose protagonist is named Artyr Rambo, first published in ''

Amazing Stories ''Amazing Stories'' is an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Science fiction stories had made regular appearance ...

'', August 1963. *

Donna Tartt Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American novelist. She wrote the novels '' The Secret History'' (1992), '' The Little Friend'' (2002), and ''The Goldfinch'' (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into ...

quotes the lines "" from in her 1992 novel ''

The Secret History ''The Secret History'' is the first novel by the American author Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. A campus novel, it tells the story of a closely knit group of six Classics students at Hampden College, a small, eli ...

''. * Brazilian musician

Rogério Skylab Rogério Tolomei Teixeira (born September 2, 1956), known professionally as Rogério Skylab, is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, classical guitarist, author, blogger, record producer, actor and short-lived television presenter. Describi ...

has a song inspired by, and titled after, the poem in his 2020 album '' Os Cosmonautas''. * In '' Murder by Numbers'' a screenshot of the opening page is shown at time stamp 36:06.

Gallery

File:BateauIvreParis4.JPG File:P1110482 Paris VI rue Ferou le bateau ivre rwk.JPG File:Bateau ivre Rue Férou 01.jpg File:Bateau ivre Rue Henry-de-Jouvenel Rue Férou 03.jpg File:Bateau ivre Rue Férou 02.jpg

References

External links