Drunken Boat Poem

The wording is always important when we read poems, not only because it create possible rhymes, but the meaning hidden between words may show the author’s true intention because the author must have chosen them carefully. The Drunken Boat is about the narrator’s wish and hopes to explore the world outside of his knowledge and break free from the restrictions posed by others. This poem takes on the form of a narrative by boat of the narrator, about its strange yet insightful journey from the Europe continent to the “Poem of the Sea”. This is a great poem for discovering the detail of words used, and the idea behind the wording. Firstly the “haulers” in line 2: “I sensed that haulers were no longer guiding me”, usually, we interpret the word as those workers who tie a boat to the port, but from the footnote that says “men with tow ropes”, I believe this can also be used as a metaphor of restriction, where the rope is not only used to fixate the boat to the port and secure the boat, but can also be used to tie a person to some place, in order to keep the narrator from going anywhere else, which equals to restrict part of the

As a 17-year-old child that the author was, and according to our own experience, the path from young to mature is filled with all kinds of trauma, this process is also usually involuntary, and there is no escape. I believe the author is using the voice of the boat to express his current situation: although tormented by numberless trauma, somehow he fails to mature, live the life that is still full of trauma, and he thinks this is not wrong. Maybe because Rimbaud did not want to fit in the rest of the world, he did not want to be categorized as one simple concept. But all those descriptions of natural views cannot be treated as any form of trauma, because they are full of colorful description and are often used to bring joy to the reader, they are usually used to impress