Rimbaud & the Mystic Way 3

"Le Bateau ivre" may or may not represent a true contemplative experience for Rimbaud, but some later poetry, especially a number of the Illuminations (most of them probably written after "Le Bateau ivre" and some, possibly, after Une Saison) seem to reveal that Rimbaud's purgative activity resulted in an illuminative state, at least at times. Clements' terminology for identifying contemplative poetry is useful at this point. Citing W.T. Stace's distinction between an "extrovertive" mystical vision, which is "the awareness of an immanent divinity through the redeemed senses," and an "introvertive" vision, which is a "consciousness of transcendent divinity beyond all the senses," Clements identifies seven characteristics which are present in authentic poetic recreations or reflections of the two kinds of mystical experience. Two of these characteristics are particularly prevalent and important: a unifying vision of reality, and a sense of a unitary consciousness. Also present are, variously: a sense of objectivity or reality; feelings of blessedness, joy, peace; the feeling that what is apprehended is holy; a paradoxicality; and an alleged ineffability. 10
Rimbaud's poetry presents problems in this context because underlying all these categories is a conventional sense of beauty, good, and divinity; his culture being devoted at least outwardly to these conventional religious and moral qualities, Rimbaud was usually at pains to deny or disfigure them, both in himself and in his poems. After "Le Bateau ivre" he wrote some extremely vulgar poems (even for our much more free-thinking age), none of which concern this discussion except to point up the nature of his spiritual/poetic program.
Some poems do fit, however, particularly in the sense of the extrovertive vision. In a sequence called Fêtes de la Patience, written in late spring of 1872, the poem "L'Eternité" begins and ends with this stanza:

Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi?-L'Eternité.
C'est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
( Oeuvres, 160)11

The word "eternity" immediately suggests some unifying sensibility, and "the sea gone with the sun"' gives us the image of a blending, unifying horizon. Interestingly, even though in the natural world the setting sun appears to go into or "with" the sea, the speaker of the poem here reverses that motion and depicts the sea going into the sun. This reversal is a kind of paradoxicality of image which reinforces, using Clements' terms, the idea that a mystical vision is being described. The fact that the speaker says eternity "is recovered" implies an objectivity of possession, maybe of knowledge, and suggests the speaker's self has glimpsed or experienced, in the paradoxical image, a unifying vision of reality.
In following stanzas the speaker addresses an "Ame sentinelle" ("guardian spirit"), which entails a dialogue with a divinity in a sense, corresponding to Underhill's Illuminative stage in which a transcendental or intuitional self engages in dialogues with divinities. This dialogue is part of "l'éternité," undoubtedly, and he speaks of the spirit being disengaged from human sufferings and common impulses, "flying accordingly," presumably out of temporal restrictions and concerns into a spiritual reality. The poem begins and ends with the image of the sea gone with the sun, and so the vision itself is derived from this image, an extrovertive mystical experience. This clarity of vision corresponds, similarly, to Underhill's second characteristic of Illumination, the clarity of vision of natural phenomena.
The difficulty noted above is that the poem reflects not, as in Underhill's terms, a "joyous" apprehension of the Absolute, or as in Clements' terms, feelings of blessedness or peace. Instead, the "âme sentinelle" is "disentangled" from human concerns, and its duty is "discharged" ("Le Devoir s'exhale / Sans qu'on dise: enfin").12 There is a sense of relief, here, but not joy: in the next stanza, "Le supplice est sûr." 13 But this is the nature of Rimbaud's mystical experience because it is the nature of the purgative process he himself has initiated and is, in May 1872, practicing. He tells Ernest Delahaye in a letter dated June 1872 that he works all night in his attic room in Paris, goes to buy bread at five a.m., sleeps

until seven, then drinks all morning (Oeuvres, 351): the disordering of his senses is apparently revealing to him whatever is described in "L'Eternité." He is not experiencing conventional joy, given the way he is proceeding ("C'est le plus delicat et le plus tremblant des habits, que l'ivresse par la vertu de cette sauge des glaciers, l'absomphe! Mais pour, apres, se coucher dans la merde!" (Oeuvres, 350),14 but he is succeeding in attaining to a vision of some kind, as the poem describes.
The next poem in the sequence, "Age d'or," concerns angelic voices singing to or about the speaker of the poem, again, a kind of dialogue with divinities suggesting that the energy of Rimbaud's intuitional self is powerfully heightened. And two poems among the Illuminations, "Aube" and "Matinée d'ivresse" (the latter perhaps having been written around the same time as "L'Eternité"), bring Rimbaud's illuminative experience more sharply into focus.
"Aube" reflects the extrovertive "Vision of Dame Kind," or vision of nature. 15 The opening sentence - "J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été" (Oeuvres, 284) 16 - immediately indicates a union of some sort is taking place as an embrace. The next paragraph evokes a sense of stillness and natural beauty, beginning with "Rien ne bougeait encore au front des palais." 17 The word "palais" calls to mind the "châteaux" of "O Saisons, ô châteaux," which Gwendolyn Bays explains refer to the occult castles symbolizing the seven stages of spiritual enlightenment in the Zohar,18 and is therefore a cue to understanding that a spiritual encounter is taking place. The stillness of the scene reflects the sense of peace in Clements' terms, and in the next paragraph a flower speaks to the speaker, an audition much like a dialogue with a divinity.
Then, as the speaker laughs at a white waterfall, reflecting a rare occasion of joy for Rimbaud, he recognizes the goddess: "je reconnus la déesse." 19 We are clearly in the vicinity of divinity at this point, and in a common occult symbol for spiritual enlightenment, "je levai un â un les voiles."20 The speaker then proceeds to chase the goddess through a series of settings, and he finally encounters her near a stand of laurel trees (symbolic of poetic activity) and enwraps or surrounds her with her own veils:

je l'ai entourée avec ses voiles amassés, et j'ai senti un peu son immense corps.21

The goddess he embraces is dawn herself, clearly a figure of enlightenment, with the multiplicity of meanings inherent in that word all at play: the light of dawn breaking, a light of spiritual dawn, particularly when veils are lifted to reveal light; and dawn as a natural figure, implying the immanence of divinity in nature, light, flowers, woods.
At the end, "L'aube et l'enfant tombèrent au bas du bois," 22 accomplishing the erotic components of the poem, from lifted veils to chase. It is an erotic union of the speaker with dawn as a figure of nature in which, not only do they embrace and unify, but the ego is lost, at the moment of union, in an oblivion characteristic of mystical experience: after falling, "Au reveil il était midi," 23 and the poem ends.
Although clearly contemplative, with a unifying vision of nature and strong indications of the illuminative mystical experience, the poem is not as innocent as it seems. The speaker is referred to as "l'enfant," and he "falls" with the goddess into the woods, suggesting not a conventional transcendental experience (even though the poem clearly has transcendental implications) but an experience of the loss of innocence in sexuality. Rimbaud reverses conventional morality here, in keeping with his own project of opposing and disturbing social, religious, and now even spiritual conventions. To be enlightened is to fall, that is, to contravene the conventional moral notion that sexual activity is part of a child's passage from the innocent to the fallen world. At the same time, the child falls into the woods, which, if read as a figure of Eden, indicates a return to a prelapsarian state. The disturbance and apparently paradoxical use of these figures represent Rimbaud's translation of his own personal activity into poetic figures. He is describing his own confusing but intense spiritual world.
"Matinée d'ivresse" similarly reflects both the experience and the means of Rimbaud's spiritual illumination. The speaker indicates some sort of illuminative experience in the first line of the poem: "0 mon Bien! 0 mon Beau!" (Oeuvres, 269). He somehow possesses

Notes

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