Le Bateau ivre

Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) is a Symbolist poem written in the summer of 1871 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, then aged sixteen.

The poem, one-hundred lines long, with four alexandrines per each of its twenty-five quatrains, describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism.

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.

Sinking through the sea, the boat describes a journey of varied experience that includes sights of the purest and most transcendent (l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs, "the yellow-blue alarum of phosphors singing"[4]) and at the same time of the most repellent (nasses / Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan, "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.

The boat's (and reader's) mounting astonishment reaches its high point in lines 87–88: Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tu dors et t'exiles / Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur?