3 Mark question
Summary of the poem" The Stolen boat "
Class 10 . English 1 st language ....
Answers
Explanation:
The poem begins with the poet confessing an incident form his childhood. On a summer evening, the young poet found a little boat tethered to a willow tree in some rocky cave. He 'stole' the boat and took it on a joy ride across the lake
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Stolen Boat by William Wordsworth Summary
Since the poem is an excerpt of a long epic, the whole poem forms one whole stanza. The poem begins with the poet confessing an incident form his childhood.
On a summer evening, the young poet found a little boat tethered to a willow tree in some rocky cave. He ‘stole’ the boat and took it on a joy ride across the lake. He was aware of his act of stealth but his guilt was intermixed with the feeling of pleasure. He says that his ride of the boat was accompanied by the echoes of the mountain. The poet steadily kept moving away from the shore and the reflection of the stars and moon left a trail of light on the surface of the water. As he sailed away from the shore, he kept his eyes on the horizon, which comprised a short crag and the stars above, to keep his path fixed to a straight, unswerving line. The poet praises the light boat he had stolen and calls is ‘an elfin pinnace’. He also praises his own prowess as a rower and compares himself and the boat to a swan that goes heaving through the water gracefully and effortlessly. This merry ride continued in peace until a mighty mountain peak upreared its head between the short crag and the stars.
As he kept rowing further away from the shore, the mountain grew in sight. The form of the huge shape frightened the poet and stirred his conscience. It seemed to chase after the poet as he kept drawing the boar away from its moor. Scared of this huge, black shape, the poet hurries back towards the cove he had stolen the boat from and returns home with a grave heart and a heavy conscience. The poet reminisces that following that incident, he had spent many days suffering from nightmares of the grim, huge shape. He says that the familiar forms, colours and shapes of nature that he had been accustomed to were replaced by the images of this huge mountain. This mountain, according to Wordsworth, was not a passive structure made of rocks or stone. It was like a living being yet different from living beings. It had taken over his thoughts by days and dreams by night. For many a day, he was tormented by the memory and solitude. Even though he realizes it’s only an optical illusion that the mountain was chasing him, it weighed heavy on his conscience and he realized the presence of beings unknown and unfathomable to him.
STANZAWISE ANNOTATIONS
‘led by her’- Here ‘her’ denotes Nature.
‘It was an act of stealth/And troubled pleasure’- What the poet is trying to say here is that stealing the boat gave him immense pleasure. It was a feeling of unrestrained freedom. Yet at the same time, he was disturbed by his guilt at having stolen someone else’s property. Hence, ‘troubled pleasure’.
‘unswerving line’- the poet kept rowing in a straight, unbending line.
‘She was an elfin Pinnace’- the boat the poet stole as a child was light and swift. It seemed as if it was enchanted, hence, he calls it an elfin pinnace.
‘craggy Steep’- by this the poet means a rocky hill.
‘the grim Shape’- the grim shape that the poet encountered in the poem was actually the form of a huge mountain.
‘Covert’- secretive; here it means a hidden place where the boat was stowed.
‘mooring-place’- mooring means a place or a structure where a vessel (like a boat) can be secured or fastened. In this poem, the boat’s mooring-place was within a rocky cave.
‘Bark’- the poet refers to the boat as bark.
‘spectacle’- an unusual or striking sight
‘That spectacle, for many days, my brain/Worked with a dim and undetermined sense/Of unknown modes of being’- the spectacle that the poet witnessed as a child, that is, the sudden, looming sight of the mountain left him wondering of things and presences beyond his understanding.
‘blank desertion’- a feeling of abandonment. He felt betrayed by the nature he had loved growing up when he was faced with its dark side.
‘But huge and mighty Forms, that do not live/Like living men, moved slowly through the mind/By day, and were a trouble to my dreams’- he was haunted by the memories of the huge shape he encountered. They looked like inhuman giants that troubled his waking as well as his sleeping hours. You may go through the detailed