The Flower Boat

by Robert Frost

An Interpretation

A brief poem is sometimes called a lyric. This is also the term we use for the lines of songs. The word itself can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks who used a stringed instrument called a lyre to accompany the reading or singing of their poems. However, lyric poetry usually expresses emotion while narrative poetry tells a story. Oftentimes poets write brief poems that do both. This poem tells a kind of story while it expresses emotion at the same time.

The fisherman is old and retired. So is his boat. We can tell that from the second stanza where the poet describes the boat as riding the sunny sod with flowers growing from her gunnels [gunwhales], which are the upper sides of a ship or boat. The dory [boat] is beached upon the grass, and flowers, like weeds, have overtaken her. She would make a good subject for a painting. Can you see her in your mind’s eye?

The fisherman spends his days telling stories of his former glory as a fisherman. He trades a story for a story, for instance, while the barber cuts his hair. One of the historic areas for fishing off New England is George’s Bank which lies off New Foundland. This is an area of shallow, warmer water where fish congregate to spawn and feed and is an area frequented by all professional fisherman from New England harbors.

The third stanza evokes the emotions of nostalgia and sadness in the reader. We are nostalgic for the irretrievable past of this old fisherman and his boat and we are sad at their fate. Both the fisherman and his dory are beached. The Elysian Fields, sometimes referred to as the Happy Isles, were where the ancient Greeks imagined their afterlife. The past is gone; the future is death; only yarn upon yarn comprises the present.

Robert Frost regularly depicted New England scenes in his early poetry. Often he begins with an every day occurrence, but, with the practiced eye of a poet, he sees so much more. One could argue that the main difference between a lyric poet and his reader is the poet’s ability to see the human condition reflected in the rhythms of nature.

The poem “The Flower Boat” is written in three stanzas of four lines each. Four line stanzas are often called quatrains. The first and third lines in each stanza rhyme, as do the second and fourth. This is often called alternating rhyme [A-B-A-B C-D-C-D E-F-E-F]. The structure of the poem mirrors the daily life of the old fisherman now, the ebb and flow of yarn upon yarn, or story after story, while his boat lies stranded on the beach. His stories may be powerful and exciting, but his boat does not move. The flowers, as if preparing him for the Elysian fields, are over-taking the boat.

A metaphor is a comparison between two, often unlike, things. Here the boat is a metaphor for the man and it both defines his present condition and forecasts his future fate.