Drunken Boat

Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) is a Symbolist poem written in the summer of 1871 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, then aged sixteen. The poem, one-hundred lines long, with four alexandrines per each of its twenty-five quatrains, describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism. It is unanimously considered to be one of the paragons of the genre, and a significant influence on modern poetry.