[In the following essay, Peschel probes the conflicting impulses, the sense of despair, and the sense of thwarted desire to discern the “unknown” that is central to Rimbaud's verse.]

Although Rimbaud's poetry was written for the most part between 1869 and 1874, it was published in the 1880s, during the heyday of French symbolism. At that time, Rimbaud's remarkable and revolutionary poetic achievements were not immediately appreciated or understood. “Aside from Rimbaud's sonnet Vowels, The Drunken Boat and several passages of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud's work and its revolutionary meaning were overlooked by the symbolists of the literary societies of 1885-1895,” notes Henri Peyre in his excellent study Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme?¹ Only with later writers, in fact—with Gide, Valéry, Claudel and René Char, for example—did Rimbaud's profound influence become apparent.

Nevertheless, the writers who called themselves “symbolistes” could admire in Rimbaud the masked, elusive quality of his utterances; the primordial importance he ascribed to the symbol rather than to direct statement; his use of synaesthesia; and his haunting, lyrical musicality. This last is especially evident in his poems written during the spring and summer of 1872, like Memory and Shame and the lyrical verses he quotes in Deliriums II of A Season in Hell. Another aspect of Rimbaud's poetry which must have appealed to the symbolists and decadents of the 1880s who wished to capture in their art new states of feeling and of consciousness is Rimbaud's search, through a derangement of the senses, for what he calls the “unknown.” “I wrote down silences, nights, I recorded the inexpressible. I determined vertigoes,” he wrote in A Season in Hell.² The symbolists of the literary societies would exalt art over nature. But before them, Rimbaud had depicted the poet-voyant's quest for the “unknown” as the ultimate emotional, moral, visionary and aesthetic experience.

In his desire to sound the secrets of the “unknown,” Rimbaud is a disciple of Baudelaire. Baudelaire's narrator in “The Voyage,” the last poem of The Flowers of Evil, reveals his desire to plunge, without regard to final punishment or reward, into the unknown of death in order to try to escape from the ennui of existence. With these words, he addresses Death, the “old captain” (“O Mort, vieux capitaine”) of his ship:

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous réconforte!
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?
An fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
Pour us your poison to comfort us! our brain burns
With such fire that we wish to plunge into the bottom
Of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what matter? into
The bottom of the Unknown to find what is new!(3)

Rimbaud is no mere follower, however. While he admires and even exalts Baudelaire in his famous letter of May 15, 1871, to Paul Demeny (hereafter called the “Lettre du voyant”),⁴ he also rebels against Baudelaire and goes beyond him. While Baudelaire dreams of the unknown of death as an escape, Rimbaud proclaims his desire not only to find, but also to reveal, the “unknown” itself.

How does the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud propose to discover the “unknown”? His impassioned words in the “Lettre du voyant” depict his revolutionary dreams and desires. “The Poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense and reasoned deranging of all his senses,” he proclaims.⁵ By experiencing “all the forms of love, of suffering, of madness,” and by becoming a physical, social and religious outcast (“he becomes … the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed one”), Rimbaud's poet finally attains his goal: he becomes “the supreme Savant!—For he arrives at the unknown!”

It is evident from these words that Rimbaud's goal of reaching the “unknown” is simultaneously full of hope and filled with despair. It is replete with hope in that it seeks novel experiences in addition to new, even ultimate, knowledge. But it intimates despair, as well, for the Poet creates himself by disorganizing himself through a derangement of his own senses. The oxymoron “reasoned deranging” (“raisonné dérèglement”) highlights Rimbaud's dual impulses for order and anarchy, for creation and disintegration. These ambivalent desires and emotions recur throughout his poetry. Constant conflicts, antithetical longings, as well as modulating moods, desires and images, become emblems of his search and of his art.

Vision and loss of vision inhere in Rimbaud's work. When the voyant arrives at the “unknown,” writes Rimbaud in the “Lettre du voyant,” he will become “crazed” and “would end up by losing the understanding of his visions … !” The “Lettre du voyant,” therefore, portrays what turns out to be Rimbaud's recurrent poetic pattern: Rebellion and sensuous derangement prepare the way for a momentary, often ecstatic, vision which then vanishes, or vanquishes the poet.

Rimbaud's celebrated poem The Drunken Boat, written only a few months after the “Lettre du voyant,” exemplifies his search for the “unknown.” Portraying in poetry the violence and vision of Rimbaud's quest, the simultaneously creative and destructive nature of his undertaking, this powerful and moving poem also traces the path of his fateful poetic pattern.

Contrasts surface almost immediately, for The Drunken Boat retells, and at times seems to relive, the experience and the results of Rimbaud's “long, immense and reasoned deranging of all his senses.” The narrator of the poem is the poet-boat. While his adventure begins passively—(he is “sailing down impassive Rivers”—he has become an active agent in his own adventure by the second stanza: “The Rivers let me sail down where I desired.”

The poet-boat's search, rooted in conflict, contrast and struggle, is a dynamic one, one that is reflected in the ever-changing images of the poem. Stanza 4, for example, balances and blends conflicting figures of a storm and a blessing, of sea and land, of intoxicated dancing on the waves and death in the sea:

La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
Plus léger qu'un bouchon j'ai dansé sur les flots
Qu'on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l'oeil niais des falots!(6)
The tempest blessed my maritime awakings.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
Which are called endless rollers of victim for ten nights,
Without missing the silly glow of the lanterns' lights.

Here, the speaker's words and his emotions create a counterpoint. While the poet-boat apparently glories in his new and joyous liberation, the fact that he says he danced ecstatically “without missing” the lights near land reveals that he is thinking about the shore. And while he ridicules that idea here, towards the end of the poem, in stanza 21, he will “long for Europe's ancient parapets.”

Throughout The Drunken Boat, opposites contrast and conjoin. The beauty of “the Poem of the Sea, / Infused with stars, and lactescent” (“le Poème / De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent”) is immediately contrasted with the horror of a drowned man sinking into the sea in stanza 6. But this drowned man is appealing, even extremely alluring, to the narrator who depicts him as “a pale flotsam in ecstasy” (“flottaison blême / Et ravie”).

Beauty and ugliness are frequently juxtaposed. Stanzas 12-14 shift rapidly back and forth from the beautiful to the repulsive: from “Rainbows stretched like bridles beneath / The horizon of the seas, to glaucous droves! (“Des arcs-en-ciel tendus commes des brides / Sous l'horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux!”) to fermenting fens and a rotting leviathan; and then from glaciers and “pearly waves” to

Échouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns
Où les serpents géants dévorés des punaises
Choient, des arbres tordus, avec noirs parfums!
Hideous stranded ships on the bed of brown bays
Where gigantic snakes which voracious bugs attack
Fall down, from twisted trees, with odors black!

The Drunken Boat progresses, then, not by means of a linear structure, but rather through constant modulations, through a clash of changing images that reflect the poet's warring drives. Still, an overall pattern, the one sketched in the “Lettre du voyant,” does emerge. Stanzas 1-5 of the poem develop the tale of how, through revolt and his sensuous derangements, the narrator achieved his liberation. Images of rebellion appear in stanza 1 where the “noisy Redskins” have slain the men who haul ships and have nailed “their naked bodies to colored poles.” In the next two stanzas, the now rebellious poet-boat says he is “heedless of all ships' crews” and he describes his single-minded concentration, which he compares to a child's, directed at experiencing those “triumphant confusions.” The fifth stanza contrasts and combines image of sourness and pleasure, cleansing water (suggestive of baptism) and vomit, intoxication and sickness, control and loss of control. After this initiation, the poet-boat, without his “grappling or rudder,” is at last free to pursue his quest for the “unknown.”

“And since then, I have bathed in the Poem of the Sea …” (“Et dès lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème / De la Mer …”), he begins. Stanzas 6-22 retell, by means of constantly balancing tensions and figures, the poet's ecstasy and agony in his all-consuming search for the “unknown.” Nothing here is static: the search is relentless, incessant; the vision sought, elusive, evanescent. In a single stanza or in successive ones, beauty and ugliness contrast and conjoin, as do hope and despair, light and darkness, vision and loss of vision. Love in stanza 7 is repulsive and appealing; sudden and slow; erotic, musical, intoxicating, powerful—and bitter. Stanza 8 juxtaposes violence (“skies bursting into lightnings, undertows / And currents and waterspouts”) with the peaceful vision of “Dawn exalted like a flock of doves.” It also contains the narrator's exclamation: “And I've seen at times what man believed he saw!”, a proclamation which is as extraordinary in what it reveals as it is disappointing in what it conceals. Erotic sensuousness pervades stanzas 9-11 in which darkness and light, horrors and beautiful visions, slow and hysterical motions, religious serenity and raging forces contrast. Stanzas 12-15 oppose the wonderful and the terrible, light and darkness.

The poet's overall pattern of vision that leads to loss of vision begins to emerge clearly in stanzas 16-18, where figures of depression, martyrdom, sobbing, helplessness and death predominate. Stanzas 19-20 try to counter this, but stanza 21 returns to the theme of depression, coloring it with fear (“I who quaked …”) and then bitter disappointment (“I have regrets: / I long for Europe's ancient parapets!”). For two lines in the next stanza the poet-boat tries to overcome his despair by recalling glorious visions of his voyage: “I saw astral archipelagoes!” he says. But in the last two lines, the speaker is a suppliant seeking a luminous vision of “future Strength.”

The last three stanzas of The Drunken Boat portray the voyager's defeat. The vision has vanished, and the poet-boat is vanquished. Nevertheless, a counterpoint is also established here, this time between the wonderful-terrible past and the dejected, death-like, and yet lyrically alluring present. This present, after all, evokes a childlike innocence and purity, for here “in the embalmed air of twilight / A crouching child filled with sadness sets down to sail / A boat as frail as a Maytime butterfly” (“vers le crépuscule embaumé / Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche / Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai”).

Although the last stanza of The Drunken Boat portrays the poet-boat's despair, still it continues to maintain that ambivalent balancing of emotion and language that so often pervades Rimbaud's poetry. The voyant is defeated here (“I can no longer … make trips,”) he says, yet he also condemns and attacks the things that now seem to overwhelm him: the “pride” around him and “the horrible eyes of prison ships.” These oppositions in The Drunken Boat reveal that conflict, which is at the heart of Rimbaud's search for the “unknown,” is also at the heart of his poetry.

Memory, a lyrical and difficult poem pervaded by what Henri Peyre calls a “polyvalent symbolism,”⁷ also exemplifies the poet's “plunge into the bottom of the abyss.” This time Rimbaud probes the “unknown” of subconscious memory, as well as the known of conscious memory. This poem, like The Drunken Boat, develops by means of incessant modulations that move almost relentlessly toward final despair.

Memory delves into the depths of its creator's past.⁸ Conflicts and shifting images resonate in all five parts of the poem. Setting the scene, Part I lyrically equates the woman figure with water. Beginning with the pure, untroubled “Clear water” of the opening phrase, the physical, emotional and symbolical scene swiftly becomes somber. Immediately, “tears” describe the “assault” against the sun by the pureness and purity of “women's white bodies” (“comme le sel des larmes d'enfance, / L'assaut au soleil des blancheurs des corps de femmes”). Next, the lines about the “pure,” and “splendid” silk of the “oriflammes / beneath the wall which some virgin maiden defended” (“la soie, en foule et de lys pur, des oriflammes / sous les murs dont quelque pucelle eut la défense”) suggest another military attack, but this time against the female—against any “virgin maiden” or against Joan of Arc, who is called “La Pucelle.” It is interesting to note that often in Rimbaud's poetry military images may evoke the poet's own father, Captain Frédéric Rimbaud, an officer who had risen from the ranks of the French Army.⁹ Later on in Memory, in fact, the sun (which in line 2 undergoes the “assault” by the “women's white bodies”) will be clearly associated with the male, the husband-father figure. And so, in this opening stanza, a brutal struggle between man and woman is symbolically described. The female assaults the male: the male attacks and even perhaps betrays the female, just as the soldiers attacked and betrayed “La Pucelle.”

The first stanza of Part II paints a scene of hopeful expectation, of waiting in an atmosphere that evokes erotic love and freedom. But the second stanza of Part II introduces ideas of suffering and envy. The sun, the sky's “rosy, belovèd Sphere,” is the male, the husband—but the distant husband. As in Part I, the female here is associated with purity, but now her purity is described rather ironically by the poet as something material, commercial. The Wife's “conjugal faith, which the poet compares to “the marsh marigold,” is, he says, “Purer than a gold coin” (“Plus pure qu'un louis … / … ta foi conjugale, ô l'Épouse!”). And this flower, anchored in the earth, envies the free, powerful, male-sun figure in the sky.

Part III, the middle section, dramatically depicts the conflict between the woman-water figure and the male-sun image. In the poet's progressively disturbing “memory” of his parents, the “Wife” has now become an unbending bourgeois “Madame” who “stands too rigidly” as she tramples upon the flowers under her foot. In contrast with her haughty, overbearing attitude and her somewhat pathetic, overly stiff stance is the figure of the beautiful, graceful male who, in fleeing far away from her, appears “like a thousand white angels who part on the roadway” (“Lui, comme / mille anges blancs qui se séparent sur la route”). Immediately, the woman is again contrasted with the male. While he, associated with the heat and light of the sun is called “white,” she is now his antithesis: “black, and chilly” as she runs after him in her desire to capture him.

Melancholy yearning, bitterness and sadness characterize Part IV. The flux and reflux of the poet's images reveal his sympathy for, as well as his anger toward, the abandoned woman-wife-madame. Erotic longings, in addition to a nostalgic longing for purity, a longing that recurs throughout this poem, appear in the first two exclamatory lines:

Regret des bras épais et jeunes d'herbe pure!
Or des lunes d'avril au coeur du saint lit!
Yearning for pure grass with its arms young and stout!
Gold of April moons in the heart of the holy bed!

But the next words reveal the tremendous conflicts at war within the poet's memory, for “joy” is “tormented by August evenings that made these putrescent things sprout!” (“Joie / … en proie / aux soirs d'août qui faisaient germer ces pourritures!”). The erotic desires of the first two lines have rapidly degenerated into “putrescences.”

In the second stanza of Part IV, the poet portrays his sympathy for, as well as his ironic detachment from, the woman-wife-mother figure when he exclaims: “Let her weep now beneath the ramparts!” (“Qu'elle pleure à présent sous les remparts!”). Because of her jealousy, her rigidity and her attempts to capture and hold as her prisoner the husband-father-sun, she has caused her own suffering, the poet implies. And yet his words reveal a certain amount of sympathy for this abandoned woman. All now seems stifled, lifeless: no powerful breath of life or love refreshes the scene. The only slight comfort in the oppressive, tormenting August evenings is the “poplars' breath” which, says the poet, unsentimentally, “counts as the sole breeze.” The entire scene, so different from the opening lines of the poem evoking “Clear water,” sunlight, whiteness, purity and “the frolic of angels” is now opaque, dull, lifeless: “the sheet / of water, without reflections, springless, gray.” An old dredger-man toiling away is now evoked, a figure undoubtedly symbolic of the poet-narrator who has dredged up in this poem his recollections colored with hopes, despairs and unending conflicts.

Part V, the last, may be spoken by the poet or by the old dredger-man he has become, an unhappy, powerless creature. Seated in a boat, the narrator is trapped. Now he is tormented by his sorrowful, deathlike surroundings: He is “the plaything of this eye of mournful water,” and he later calls the water “ashen” (“couleur de cendre”). Because he is caught in his past, in his memories, and in his pathetically limited physical state (“oh motionless dinghy! oh! too short arms!”), he cannot grasp any image of escape, neither one that troubles him nor even one that could comfort him:

je n'y puis prendre …
… ni l'une
ni l'autre fleur: ni la jaune qui m'importune,
là; ni la bleue, amie à l'eau couleur de cendre.
I cannot grasp either flower …
… not the yellow one, there, troubling me,
or the friendly blue one in the ashen water.

While the stanza just discussed contrasts hope and despair, the final stanza juxtaposes figures of life and of death. Amid images of decay which yet may signify the seeds of new life (“the dust of the willows shaken by a wing! / The roses or the reeds consumed a long time / Ago!”), the narrator says that his boat is trapped. Surrounded by endless water, he cannot escape in, or from, his motionless vessel. And he asks “in what slime?” is he anchored. Having plunged into the known and unknown of his past, he finds that he cannot free himself from the figures and conflicts that pervade the memories of his childhood. As in The Drunken Boat, the poet's plunge in Memory into “the bottom of the abyss” has exhausted and overcome him.

“Rimbaud draws plentifully in the most confused, the purest sometimes and the most profoundly buried in himself and in us,” writes Henri Peyre. “Poetry with Rimbaud becomes a means of exploration of the depths that lie beyond clear consciousness. … It also becomes a means of knowledge.”¹⁰The Drunken Boat and Memory, these two splendid and symbolic poems, portray Rimbaud's search for the “unknown,” for the knowledge that lies buried in those depths.

While The Drunken Boat and Memory are quite different in language, style, tone and structure, they are similar in several ways. Both poems, for example, develop and progress by means of Rimbaud's continually modulating images and ideas. In both works, ceaseless conflicts create vibrant, moving, ever-altering atmospheres in which the poet's visions finally darken, and the poet-quester is overwhelmed. Although the old dredger in his dinghy at the end of Memory is the antithesis of the intoxicated poet-boat at the height of his ecstasy, the impotent figure in his motionless boat in Memory is strangely similar to the enervated, despondent poet-boat at the end of his journey in The Drunken Boat. Both travelers are powerless, caught, unable to move for physical and emotional reasons. In each poem, the narrator's symbols evolve to create a more and more depressing, frustrating and desperate scene.

As the poetic heir of Baudelaire who sensed “forests of symbols” all around him and who wished to plunge into “the bottom of the Unknown to find what is new!”, Rimbaud sought to burst through all barriers in order to discover the new—not just what is different, but what is “unknown.” His creative-destructive search permeates his poetry and contributes to its dramatic tension. The Drunken Boat and Memory are two remarkable illustrations both of the method of Rimbaud's search and of its tragic outcome. Elusive and alluring, tormented and tormenting, the “unknown” that Rimbaud discovers reveals its riches while continuing to conceal them. His “unknown” is wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly, creative and destructive. It is, as the poet's phrase so beautifully puts it in War, a poem whose title portrays the inherent violence of Rimbaud's artistic undertaking, a vision of “eternal modulation” (“inflexion éternelle”).¹¹ This is the “terrible beauty” that Rimbaud is able to bring back from his hope-filled and desperate “plunge into the bottom of the abyss.”

Notes

1. Henri Peyre, Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), p. 74. All translations in this article are my own.

2. Deliriums II in Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. The Illuminations, trans. Enid Rhodes Peschel (New York, London, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 77.

3. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), p. 127.

4. “Baudelaire is the first voyant, king of poets, a real God,” Rimbaud wrote. Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972), p. 253.

5. In Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. The Illuminations (note 2, above), p. 7.

6. The French texts of The Drunken Boat and Memory are from the 1972 Pléiade edition (note 3, above).

7. Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (note 1, above), p. 69.

8. For a penetrating reading of this poem, see Nathaniel Wing, “Metaphor and Ambiguity in Rimbaud's ‘Mémoire,’” Romanic Review, Vol. LXIII, No. 3 (October 1972), pp. 190-210.

9. Captain Rimbaud deserted his wife and four children when his son Arthur was six years old. For a discussion of Rimbaud's depiction of parent figures, including his association of military images with the father figure, see Enid Rhodes Peschel, Flux and Reflux Ambivalence in the Poems of Arthur Rimbaud (Genève, Switzerland: Droz, 1977), pp. 102-121.

10. Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (note 1, above), p. 61.

11. In Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. The Illuminations (note 2, above), p. 171.