These polarizing images and moods narrate the boat’s perilous and awe-inspiring voyage while giving the poem’s structure an undulating shape that mirrors the movement of the boat itself. The poem continuously rocks back and forth from the speaker’s sense of urgency and the boat’s rapid rolling motion in the first stanza, to the boat’s relaxed tone and languid passage in the second. This gruel of stars mirrors the milky sky,ĭrowned men, pale, and thoughtful, sometimes drift by (Rimbaud 120). Lulled by storms, I drifted seaward from sleep. Ten days, beyond the blinking eyes of land! Rimbaud continues building on this suggestive and metaphor-based structure by dividing his verse into four-line stanzas that contain images varying between destruction and beauty: The suggestive manner that Rimbaud connects himself to the poem’s central metaphor parallels the symbolists’ reliance on suggestion rather than statement. The first person narrative and sailing references transforms the poem’s speaker into a nautical vessel, which becomes clear in the last two lines of the second stanza: “When my bargemen could no longer haul me/ I forgot about everything and drifted on” (Rimbaud 120). In the poem’s first stanza, Rimbaud immediately establishes himself as the speaker and the poem’s central metaphor: “I drifted on a river I could not control/ No longer guided by the bargemen’s ropes” (Rimbaud 120). He centers “The Drunken Boat” around the metaphor of a boat sailing through a river filled with carnage that finds occasional moments of calm. In constructing an allegory for his youth, Rimbaud relies heavily on metaphor as the poem’s chief organizing principle.

Jean Moréas’ manifesto for Symbolism outlines critical elements of style established by the symbolists: “Moréas advocated a nonrhetorical poetry based on suggestion rather than statement, a poetry that employs metaphor as the chief organizing principle and seeks a ‘musicality’ not dependent on regular rhythm and rhyme” (Porter 14). The poem’s stylistic elements display the symbolists’ influence over Rimbaud’s early work. Rimbaud made his official entrance into the literary world at sixteen with his poem “The Drunken Boat”: an allegory of Rimbaud’s youth when he transgressed societal norms and began defying the poetic conventions of Parnassian poetry. Their incorporation of symbols, suggestive manner of writing, and loose style of verse culminate the stylistic elements that define the Symbolist movement.Īs a young poet, Rimbaud initially followed the Symbolists’ pursuit of extending the limits that the Parnassians posed on poetry. They further revolutionized stylistic elements in their poetry by freeing their verse, and eventually developed prose poetry. They sought methods of describing absolute truths indirectly, and began endowing particular images and objects with specific meanings, thus establishing symbols. Dissatisfied with the naturalism of their Parnassian precursors, poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine searched for methods that pushed what they saw as limits of poetic expression. The Symbolist movement in poetry began with the crisis shared among the major French poets of the 19th century. By composing A Season in Hell with the stylistic elements of Symbolism and the psychoanalytical focus that dominated Surrealism, Rimbaud bridges the gap between both poetic movements. Rimbaud portrays his unconscious thoughts and memories in A Season in Hell with the style he adapted from studying the symbolists. Yet Rimbaud pushed the boundaries of poetic expression even further with his efforts to penetrate the deepest layers of the mind.īy 1873, Rimbaud began exploring the mysterious realm of the unconscious through his own method of psychoanalysis, a popular subject of Surrealism: a movement that entered the literary scene nearly four decades after the French Symbolists. Rimbaud began fulfilling his goal by studying the work of the symbolists and incorporating their revolutionary modes of expression into his own poetry.

Throughout his career, he sought visionary status by pushing the boundaries of poetic expression with his efforts of materializing the supernatural in his poetry. As a young poet, Arthur Rimbaud expressed a keen desire of becoming a seer: one who forecasts the future through supernatural insight.

Rimbaud illuminations pdf