Drunk As Drunk - Analysis

Intoxication as a Way of Traveling

The poem’s central claim is that desire can become a kind of voyage: it carries the lovers forward, suspends ordinary time, and finally leaves them craving something more basic than ecstasy. The opening comparison, Drunk as drunk on turpentine, is telling: turpentine is not wine but a sharp, solvent smell, suggesting an intoxication that is both pleasure and sting. The speaker is overwhelmed by open kisses and the wet body pressed against his own, and that physical closeness becomes the engine of movement, as if the lovers’ embrace is what makes the world go.

The tone here is lush and heady, even a little dangerous. Turpentine hints at fumes, dizziness, and flammability: passion as something you breathe in until you can’t think straight.

A Boat Made of Flowers, A Body Made of Weather

The lovers’ setting is part literal boat, part dream object: our boat that is made of flowers. That image makes the journey feel festive and fragile at once. Flowers can’t really be a hull; the poem is admitting from the start that this voyage runs on metaphor and appetite, not practicality. The speaker says feasted, we guide it, turning love into a meal that fuels navigation.

Even the hands are transformed: their fingers are like tallows (soft candle fat) adorned with yellow metal. The mixture of grease and gold suggests bodies both animal and precious. And above them is a heat-haze cosmos, the sky’s hot rim, with the day’s last breath caught in their sails. The world seems to exhale into their motion, as if the weather itself is participating in the affair.

The Turn: From Endless Drift to the Taste of Land

The poem pivots when it names time explicitly: Pinned by the sun between solstice and equinox. The lovers are not just sailing; they are held in place by season and light, suspended in a long, drowsy interval. What initially felt like freedom begins to read as entrapment. They drifted for months, drowsy and tangled, and when they wake, the sensual register sours into discomfort: bitter taste of land on their lips, eyelids all sticky. The earlier wetness of erotic pleasure is replaced by a sticky aftermath, as if the body’s sweetness has turned to residue.

This is the poem’s key tension: the same intimacy that felt like a miracle also becomes claustrophobic, a long trance that can’t feed them forever.

Craving the Ordinary: Lime, Rope, and a Well

After months of floating in a private world, they begin to long for sharp, practical sensations: we longed for lime and for the sound of a rope lowering a bucket down its well. Lime suggests acidity and clarity, a taste that cuts through nausea. The well is the opposite of the flower-boat: not fragile ornament, but depth, labor, and fresh water drawn up by effort. Even the poem’s sound-image matters here; it’s not a sight they miss but the sound of the rope, a homely music that implies community, thirst, and gravity.

In other words, the lovers don’t simply want to keep drifting on desire. They want contact with a world that resists them and sustains them.

The Fortunate Isles: Paradise or Another Net?

The ending seems to offer arrival: we came by night to the Fortunate Isles. But Neruda refuses a clean resolution. They don’t stride ashore; they lay like fish under the net of our kisses. The return of the kiss-image is tender, yet the metaphor of a net reintroduces the poem’s darker undertow. A net can cradle, but it also captures. And fish under a net are alive, breathing, and trapped in the same moment.

So the poem closes in a double light: the lovers find a kind of paradise, yet it’s still shaped like enclosure. The sensual world that carried them here is also what holds them down.

A Sharp Question the Poem Leaves Behind

If their boat is made of flowers, what happens when the flowers decay? The poem hints that love’s most intoxicating states are not meant to last for months without consequence: sooner or later the mouth wants lime, the body wants water from a well, and even paradise starts to resemble a net.