Some literary critics have pointed out connections between the poem “The Drunken Boat” by French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and two songs by Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Chimes of Freedom” (you will find the lyrics in the e-book Songs by Bob Dylan).
You can listen to the songs on My Bob Dylan Spotify Playlist (Links to an external site.). Also read this excerpt from Rimbaud’s “Voyant” letter. (By the way, the speaker of “The Drunken Boat” is the boat itself.) One interesting thing about Rimbaud is that he wrote all his poetry when he was a teenager.
In his book Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin writes,
Just as his life became more chaotic and his poetry more self-conscious, Dylan began to take upon himself the visionary mantle Rimbaud demanded of the true poet: “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of the senses. He reaches for the unknown and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them.” In February 1964 … Dylan was telling his companions … “That’s the kind of writing I’m gonna do.” … He must follow the Rimbaudian seer onto his magic swirlin’ ship (Dylan’s version of Rimbaud’s drunken boat.)
Timothy Hampton, in his book Bob Dylan’s Poetics, tells us,
Rimbaud’s images radiate in different directions, evoking different elements, splitting names from things and stressing the subjective experience of the individual. The technique of evoking two different senses and two different elements at the same time is what makes possible the expansion of the experience of the drunken boat, as the sky and the sea become one with each other. These details of Rimbaud’s poetry foreshadow the associative poetics that Dylan uses in “Chimes of Freedom.”
After reading “The Drunken Boat” and the “Voyant” letter, and reading and listening to the Dylan songs, in the Reply box below discuss what you think about all this in an essay with at least 500 words of your own writing (no quotations).
