It also leads to a third possible interpretation, to be discussed later.

In the second ‘visionary’ letter Rimbaud amplifies his assertion that ‘I is another’ with a metaphor which smacks of the alchemy which reputedly interested him for a while. ‘If copper awakes as a clarion, it is in no way its fault.’ The implication is that the ‘I’ is not what it thinks, and can be transmuted magically into other things. Indeed, Rimbaud then confirms this idea unambiguously by declaring that he is a witness to the birth of his own thought, which he watches and listens to. Then, choosing a musical analogy, he completes his argument by claiming that he has merely to touch his bow and the whole symphony stirs in the depths and leaps up. In other words, the self, the selves which inhere in the ‘I’, are both vaster than we know and unavailable to us by conventional means.

Rimbaud then claims that only the true poet can reach the unknown ‘I’, and only do so by means of what he calls, in another celebrated phrase, ‘the systematic disordering of the senses’. Here lies the route to the visionary state, and if it smacks of a reckless abandonment to the pleasure principle—as it has too readily been regarded by some of Rimbaud’s later ‘disciples’—in fact it requires that discipline, that ascesis which was pointed to above. Rimbaud is not granting a licence for self-indulgence. For all the drugs, drink, sex, and rebelliousness—he was still only an adolescent 16 when he wrote these letters—his life at this stage was scarcely comfortable, and it became progressively more demanding and austere. He goes on to say that the disordering (dérèglement) of the senses involves all forms of love, suffering, and even madness. Metaphorical poisons have to be absorbed and distilled, the awful tortures of mind, soul, and body welcomed, if the goal, the unknown (l’inconnu), is to be reached, a condition which Rimbaud equates with ultimate, objective truth. The punishing road to the unknown can be trodden only by ‘horrible workers’.

If this visionary programme sounds mystical and impractical, the extraordinary fact is that from mid-1871 Rimbaud did his best to put it into action in his life and his writing. A matter of weeks after the two letters were written he was in Paris, having sent some poems to the young and rising poet Paul Verlaine, obtaining in return an invitation from him to come to the capital. From that time on, Rimbaud’s life would become uncompromisingly rootless, anti-bourgeois, removed from the ususal considerations of money, comfort, and status. His poetry was about to show the most extreme results of a deliberately disordered imagination.

It is in one of the poems of that period, the celebrated ‘Drunken Boat’, that the visionary ideal and, prophetically, its failure are made flesh with astonishing brilliance. A wild poem in strictly measured form, ‘Drunken Boat’ was written when Rimbaud had not so much as glimpsed the ocean. Its account of a dream-voyage through uncharted seas, undertaken by an empty boat whose crewmen have all been killed, is an extended metaphor for the poet’s discovery and ultimate loss of new light, new colour, new sound—in short, the new vision. As in Joseph Conrad’s story Heart of Darkness, the journey through unknown waters is a journey into the depths of the self. At the start of the poem the boat frees itself from any European association, represented by the cargoes of Flemish wheat and English cotton. Now that the crewmen are dead the boat is able to go where it will. Some stanzas further on, in a lovely line, the boat tells us that it is bathing in the Poem of the Sea; there now begins a sustained account of the voyage in the most vivid tones imaginable. A new world is discovered, of reefs, rocks, rainbows, glaciers, fish, sea-horses, Leviathans, moons, and suns … Rimbaud’s imagination works at fever-pitch to create an unprecedented dreamscape. The adventure is the disordering of the senses, the dream is the vision itself, the unknown that can only become real once the poet-boat has slipped the moorings of the ego.

The poem is also, however, the recognition of failure, the sad acknowledgement that the vision has not been sustained. The first signs come in the middle of the poem, when the boat announces with regret that it would have liked to show the wonderful golden fish to children (and, incidentally, we are reminded of the neglected children of Rimbaud’s first poem). It is not to be. In one of the saddest moments in all of Rimbaud’s work, the boat concedes not just that the dream is over, but that it, and the poet, have come full circle and must now accept what perhaps was always their destiny, their selfhood, their ‘I’, reintegrated into the old pre-visionary, fallen world:

If I want Europe, it’s a dark cold pond
Where a small child plunged in sadness crouches
One fragrant evening at dusk and launches
A boat frail as a butterfly in May.

The poem then closes in abject desolation, for if the poet-boat is resigned to the old order before dérèglement, it is also quite devoid of energy and will, and is haunted by prison-ships looking down with terrible eyes, a lingering image of crime and punishment reminding us that issues of guilt and redemption are never far from the surface in Rimbaud.

Rimbaud can be more enigmatic, more closed in his meaning, but nowhere does he astonish as much as in ‘Drunken Boat’. This poet of visions, this hurt, angry boy-genius, unleashes torrents of the most dynamic imagery and vocabulary, stretching the French language as far as it will go. His poetry abounds in coinages and neologisms as it struggles to keep pace with the vision that is always running ahead and threatening to vanish. Language bursts out of abstraction and floods the senses. Another famous poem, ‘Vowels’, turns the five sounds into colours, reminiscent of that neurological phenomenon known as synaesthesia, of which Baudelaire gives some idea in his celebrated ‘Correspondances’ sonnet.4 By the time of ‘Drunken Boat’, Rimbaud’s poetry is as blinding as those suns which are a hallmark of his work, his language resembling a high-voltage electrical circuit, overloaded, as Iris Murdoch has put it,5 to the point where it fuses and explodes in spectacular constellations.

‘Drunken Boat’ was among Rimbaud’s last poems in verse, a constraint which ensured that the forms of his writing at least remained orthodox in appearance. However, in view of his impatient search for new expression it was predictable that he should reject formal limitations, and from around 1872 adopt the much looser-looking structures of the so-called prose poem, and indeed of discursive prose itself.

A Season in Hell

The summer of 1872 finalized the break with Rimbaud’s old life, for at that point, after some desultory months spent initially in a disappointing Paris and then with family in the Ardennes, he returned to the capital in July, only to decide to leave France, inviting Verlaine to accompany him.