A Paper About Poets and Port

"Cheers!",

"À ta santé"[to your health],

or

"Что у трезвого на уме, то у пьяного на языке."
[What a sober man has on his mind, a drunk one has on his tongue.]:

A paper about poets and port

by Thomas C. Andrews

We all drink for different reasons. Celebration, depression, freedom, release. Some even drink for poetry. Or wax poetic over drink. Poets across many eras and languages have recorded their ideas, so to speak, on their bar-napkins; perhaps the drink puts one in an easier state as a medium for such things. As is common with such shortcuts, any pleasure or benefit one derives come at a price. Of course, poets aren't the only people who've heard the saying: " en vino, veritas" [in wine, truth]. Perhaps the truths are painful. Even if they aren't, the hangover is.

Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre" [The Drunken Boat] is a poem about coming to age: it is both about the author in this respect and the societies of man birthing at the time of it's writing. The poem is rich in synesthesia: the author combines the sensations of seafaring with the sensations of a reeling drunk. Rimbaud is overwhelmed with the ocean's scenery: "bathed in the Poem of the Sea," [1] a Sea which is dangerous and churns as well as hides wondrous beauty. This Sea is the world in which mankind progresses, particularly this young French poet.

The progression of the poem takes in this beauty much like a night of heavy drinking. First things are calm and Rimbaud "float[s] down unconcerned rivers," [2] but eventually he is sick and overwhelmed. The images slowly change toward ones of chaos, and perhaps, a storm. "I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings," Rimbaud describes: Europe, his home, was going through some tumultuous times around the writing of this poem, in 1871. Civilizations were rearranging themselves and new technology was everywhere.

The ocean becomes a place instead where "a dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down." [3] Finally even describes himself as wreckage. "I, whose wreck, dead drunk and sodden for water" longs for the simpler time: the image he conjures is one of childhood:

"If I want a water of Europe, it's the pool

Black and cold where into the fragrant dusk

A child squatting full of sadnesses launches

A boat fragile as a butterfly in may" [4]

It is in these lines that one finds Rimbaud's rosy spectacles, his reason for drinking, and a tender image of a human being as a something always set out alone against the weather. The boat this sad child launches is his life, and at the same time it is everyone's life. We just hope for good sailing weather, and so does Rimbaud.

Another poem called "The Stranger" by Alexandre Blok, invokes a different sort of situation. The first stanzas of this poem describe the bar scene in St. Petersburg: we see all sorts of drunken images of a negative connotation: "…shouts drift from the drunken haunts/ On the putrid breath of spring" and even "the moon leers down like a drunkard." [5] before finally finding our speaker in the midst of all of it, drinking with a close friend. "Each evening my one and only friend/ Reflected at my glass's brink/ Like me is fuddled and constrained/ By thick, mysterious drink." [6]

In fact, Mr. Blok is getting sloppy all alone: his "one and only friend" is his reflection. Soon we see why: "each night at the appointed moment" a girl appears in the shadows, and no ordinary girl. "…a breath of ancient legends gathers/ About her dress as it swing / About her hat with it's mourning feathers/ And her hand with it's rings." Blok doesn't go up to talk to this girl, even though he is drunk and feeling forward, even as "vague confidences in [his] ear are loosed;" he does not go up to talk to her because she represents an ideal. If he were to talk to her, she would become a real, flawed person: one gets the sense that it could really shatter the guy. It is unclear whether this stranger is real or "in a dream;" but still, we see Blok's reason for drinking. The lonely poet reflected in his glass wonders if perhaps someone here, in this bar, were right for him: if someone here in this bar, tonight, would satisfy him. He can't but hope.

Thousands of years before these two men, an Islamic Sufi mystic named Jelaluddin Rumi also wrote about drink- a whole series of poems, even. It is difficult to draw distinctions: Rumi's work was written untitled upon tile plates. "Don't hand me another glass of wine," Rumi writes, "Pour it in my mouth. I've lost the way to my mouth."[7] His poetry is a whirling insistence on life, intent on squeezing every drop out.

In his poem "Who says words with my mouth?" there is an implicit comparison drawn between the life of a human person and an excursion drinking. "This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober…" the analogy brings to question an afterlife. "I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home;" [8] in Rumi's time, there weren't designated drivers. One's best bet was to hang onto the neighbor's elbow-crook and walk home.

For Rumi, the experience of drunkenness is an experience of chaos which is closely related to mysticism. The Sufis would spin in circles for hours in order to achieve an altered mystical ecstatic state. In "The New Rule," Rumi compares this mystical ecstasy with drunkenness, love, and chaos: all have the power to bring one out of one's established routines and responses and into the real truth of the living moment.

"It's the old rule that drunks have to argue

and get into fights.

The lover is just as bad. He falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds something shining,

worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.

I took it as a sign to start singing,

falling up into the bowl of sky.

The bowl breaks. Everything is falling everywhere.

Nothing else to do.

Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,

and fall toward the glassblower's breath."[9]

The message of this poem is clear: even drunk, or in love, one does not need "to argue and get into fights." The bowl may break, and everything may fall everywhere, but the new rule is still to embrace, "and fall toward the glassblower's breath." Rumi, if he is drunk, is so in order to communicate his impressions of the world, in celebration, or, in another poem, "because it's spring." [10]

Reasons for drinking are like reasons for writing or reading. They are complicated, subjective, and as diverse as the thousands of different times, wines, and moments that give them birth. Whatever was in the glasses these men lifted, it is the words from their mouths and minds that are permanent. Their poems will be an invitation to another time; to reel on Rimbaud's boat, or get an ale in a St. Petersburg bar in 1906, or to spin in a circle with Rumi. These three poets are only an example of a long and illustrious literature of alcohol. I raise my glass to them: all poets, people, and drunks who find truth by whatever means necessary.

---

[1]"Le Bateau Ivre" d'Arthur Rimbaud

[2] "Le Bateau Ivre" Rimbaud

[3]« Le Bateau Ivre » Rimbaud

[4] « Le Bateau Ivre » Rimbaud

[5] "The Stranger" by Alexandre Blok: translated by Jon Stallworthy & Peter France

[6] "" Blok. Transl: France, Stallworthy

[7] untitled, p.5-6 The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

[8] "Who says words with my mouth?" Rumi transl. Coleman Barks

[9] "The New Rule" Rumi transl.: Coleman Barks

[10] "Flutes for Dancing" Rumi transl. Coleman Barks