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Rimbaud illuminations5/17/2023 The two men were soon being seen in public as lovers, and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine’s marriage. Embarking upon a life of drink and debauchery, he became involved in a homosexual relationship with Verlaine that gave rise to scandal. He arrived there in September 1871, stayed for three months with Verlaine and his wife, and met most of the well-known poets of the day, but he antagonized them all-except Verlaine himself-by his rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity. Rimbaud was already a marvelous poet, but his behaviour in Paris was atrocious. Images of startling vividness flash by and melt unexpectedly into each other with the fleeting clarity of hallucinations, and the poetic evocation of colours, movement, and the feel of the waters pull directly at the reader’s senses. A pounding rhythm drives the poem forward through enjambment across the verses, with internal rhymes and excited repetitions mounting on alliteration as with the swell of the envisioned sea. Here Rimbaud succeeded in his aim of matching form to vision. But monsters threaten, the dream breaks up in universal cataclysm, weariness and self pity take over, and both boat and voyant capitulate. ![]() ![]() The voyant himself is on an ecstatic search for some unnamed ideal that he seems to glimpse through the aquatic tumult. Ostensibly, “Le Bateau ivre” describes the journey of the voyant in a tipsy boat that has been freed from all constraints and launched headlong into a world of sea and sky that is heaving with the erotic rhythms of a universal dynamic force. This is perhaps his finest poem, and one that clearly demonstrates what his method could achieve. In a burst of self-confidence, Rimbaud composed “Le Bateau ivre” (“ The Drunken Boat”). Verlaine, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to Paris and sent the money for his fare.
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