Stolen Boat Poem by William Wordsworth
The Stolen Boat Poem by William Wordsworth is an excerpt from his autobiographical poem The Prelude and is about a childhood incident where Wordsworth stole a boat and rowed it across a lake.
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.
“The Boat” tells the story of sixteen-year-old Mai, whose family has placed her on a boat full of refugees trying to escape the hardships of Communist Vietnam in the late 1970s. Caught in a storm, the refugees find themselves without engine power and rapidly dwindling resources.