26/11/2023
Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) is a 100-line verse-poem written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud. The poem 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 considered a masterpiece of French Symbolism.
Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at the age of seventeen by Étienne Carjat, c. 1872.
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 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's volume of French poetry Les Fleurs du mal and Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 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 nove
As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers: Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets Nailing them naked to coloured stakes. I cared nothing for all my crews, Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
