Conventionally poetry, like all writing, recognizes implicitly that there is a gap between what is put forward—the subject-matter—and the intelligent self which puts it forward—the writer as an autonomy. Even a poem’s most startling images show that a creative imagination has organized the material, put it into a language shared by all. This is how Rimbaud’s poetic language works in the verse poems, even in the most visionary, such as ‘Drunken Boat’. Here, in seeing the visions the boat is a commentator on them. But in at least some of the poems in Illuminations it is not the case that the visions manifest themselves to a beholder; rather, it is as though the vision were in the beholder, and the beholder in the vision. Thus, ‘I is another’ might mean that ‘I’—an identity which stands apart—is in fact organically part of ‘the other’. Subject is object, and the desired objective poetry has been found. Taken in this way Rimbaud’s thinking becomes more recognizable, his preoccupation with the duality of self and non-self linked to a tradition of philosophical enquiry stretching back at least to Descartes.

If Illuminations represent Rimbaud’s hugest ambition, they also hint at failure and the silence to come. Beyond the exhilaration of their visions, many pages are as sad, if not as sharply angry, as some of A Season in Hell or the verse poems: ‘Tale’, for example, or ‘Dawn’, the account of an adventure which unfolds as a metaphor for the new poetry.7 As so frequently in Rimbaud’s work, this piece opens to the confident promise of new light. The ‘I’ figure, the poet-persona, has embraced the dawn. The ‘I’ united with the dawn, therefore the sun, and by extension creation itself, is synonymous with the confidence that objective and subjective worlds are one. The first line is the poem’s high point; what follows is the account of how that point supposedly was reached. In a wonderful sequence which recreates the sheer magic of dawn’s arrival, Rimbaud weaves into the textures of astonishment some ominous hints that the adventure in fact did not happen at all. The second half of this tightly structured poem in prose makes clear the awesome reality of the dawn’s size, its strength and speed, all of which turn out to have been too much for the ‘I’. Significantly, towards the end ‘I’ has turned into a beggar trying vainly to keep pace with the fast-growing dawn. And, claiming to have tied up the dawn goddess in her own veils, ‘I’ confesses to having done no more than to feel only a fraction of her immensity. The final line, perfectly balancing the first and yet opposing its softness with its own shrill vowels, tells of a bitter defeat. Rimbaud now distances ‘I’ as a third person, ‘the child’ who wakes at noon to find, naturally, that dawn has gone. The visionary poet, then, believes that in his dream of wrestling the dawn to the ground and losing himself in her he has glimpsed the new poetry. But the metaphor says that this is an illusion from which Rimbaud must awake.

Beyond Poetry: Rimbaud’s Legacy

When the journey towards the visionary goal finally ran out of road, Rimbaud’s restlessness did not give way to immobility. The march through poetry became a march across the world. If poetry cannot change life, as he hoped, then hope too must go. But the insistent drive towards something endured. After about 1874 Rimbaud deserted poetry and continued his ascesis by other means. His remaining, adult years were even more punishing (self-punishing, we might suspect) than those that had gone before. He made a living in a variety of ways. Moving from country to country, covering huge distances largely on foot, he found work as a teacher, was employed by a circus company, became a quarry foreman, a mercenary—and deserter—and finally tried to establish himself as an arms-dealer in north Africa—although not, as once wrongly supposed (on the basis of a request he made for ‘a mule and two slave boys’), as a slave-trader. The indifference Rimbaud showed towards conventional notions of career and success indicate that to him, since poetry was dead, so was the vision: he did not believe that anything would make the vision happen now. Real life is absent, he wrote in A Season in Hell, and it is one of his most conclusive pronouncements. The final phase of Rimbaud’s life, the tough years in unforgiving places, show that, in that absence of the real life, he resolved to accommodate himself to the limitations, as exigent as they are prosaic, of the only world possible.