Abstract: The present study offers a critical look at a variant of the “metaphor of navigation” catalogued in Curtius and which has served, since antiquity, as a figure for the writing of a text itself, from its opening moments (or departure/moment of setting sail) to its closure (or arrival/docking): namely, the figure of a ship taking flight, which one encounters in works ranging from Dante’s Paradisio to Lamartine’s Chute d’un ange, Hugo’s Légende des siècles and in Rimbaud’s poetic corpus.
