“Le bateau ivre”—an aporetic journey

This article examines the network of references to childhood in Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre.” Four in number, they reveal the deeper architecture of the poem through their syntactic and thematic traits. In consequence, the boat’s journey can be divided into two principal parts—unreflective, self‐absorbed escape followed by increasingly weary, skyward rise. These are followed by a two‐part, four‐stanza conclusion which articulates two different aporias. The boat ends hovering between life among the stars and death by water in stanzas 22 and 23. Meanwhile, the final two stanzas successively reject the worlds of both childhood and adulthood. Rimbaud affirms that the poet stands apart from both boy and man, both of whom he has left behind. Uncertainty over “future vigeur” is balanced by the certainty that the aesthetic life separates the poet from both childhood innocence and modern civilization. I end by contrasting Rimbaud’s conjunction of Eros and Thanatos with Freud’s in Civilization and Its Discontents , suggesting that the essential difference is the absence of both a superego and a desire to live communally in “Le bateau ivre.”