20 pages • 40 minutes read
George Gray
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Symbols & Motifs
The Sailboat
The figure chiseled into George Gray’s tombstone—a sailboat with its sails closed and wrapped up—returns the poem to a distinctly 19th-century romanticism. Written on the very threshold of the new age of aviation that would introduce pop culture to an entirely new set of daring transportation metaphors, “George Gray” harks to the 19th-century maritime culture and its perception of the sailboat to suggest the exhilarating freedom and terrifying fears found in challenging life’s most perplexing emotional challenges.
The sailboat symbolizes both the courage to launch against and into life, but also the terrifying vulnerability of such a challenge. Tiny is the boat, vast is the sea. On the one hand, the sailboat symbolizes a person’s willingness to respond within the free-flowing kinetics of wind and wave, suggesting the inevitable highs and lows of life’s grand adventure. But a sailboat was no steamer, no barge, no schooner. Thus, it symbolizes also the dangers inherent in life, the unanticipated failures, the grievous losses, the disappointments.
That the sailboat here is chiseled in stone on a grave smack in the middle of the landlocked Midwest symbolizes ultimately the irony of a man forever left without even the memory of adventure, a man whose sailboat never left harbor.
The Open Sea
The open sea symbolizes the adventure of life itself—driven by the crazy and unpredictable “winds of destiny” (Line 11)—which beckons the sailboat anchored in the harbor. Looked back upon after a life of following such beckoning suggests the fulfillment of a life well-lived and the grateful movement into the peace of death. The sea for the 19th-century culture symbolized the grand adventure that those who stayed landlocked would never experience. That life of thrills, terrors, and rewards defined a life well-lived, a life that resisted the claustrophobic, soul-oppressive life on land, whether in the tedium of farm work or the soul-numbing dehumanization of the city.
But here the opposite is the case. George Gray sees now what he should have done—head out to sea; that is, follow the clarion call to live, to risk, to see what he is made of by responding to the challenge of uncertainties, to take a chance. Now dead and looking back, George Gray understands that he was never afraid of the “sea” (and the word requires quotes because of its heavy symbolic weight). Fear of the sea is reserved only for those who head their sailboats, who rise to the challenge of adventure. He was not afraid of the sea, but he was afraid of being afraid.
The fact that the speaker never challenged himself becomes his tragedy. His life, for all its comfortable routine and predictable security, was little more than a “boat longing for the sea” (Line 16).
The Color Gray
The only specific exposition given about the speaker is his name, George Gray. It is an appropriate name for what it symbolizes: “Life without meaning is the torture” (Line 14), the speaker suggests. In this, the speaker captures his tragic position in the midst of perceiving his life. There is the life of adventure, the person willing to rise to the challenges of life’s choices and to thrive within the kinetic field of chance—and to never regret the journey itself and to find in that adventure a meaningful and rewarding life. And then there is the un-life of the great majority who live only through the dogged commitment to routine, who allow their lives to be shaped entirely by the dependable, the predictable, and the safe, who cannot even be tempted to imagine the intoxicating freedom of engaging life as an adventure to be lived every moment.
George Gray, however, is suspended in the between. He is bold enough to understand the tantalizing possibilities of risk and the delight inherent in bold choices, both good ones and poor ones; and he is cautious enough to have understood the safety and security of not seeking that life of adventure but to remain committed to work and to the modest rewards of a bland life. Thus, he lives (and dies) in that in-between, a lackluster and tepid world of grays, neither animated enough for adventure nor black and white enough to find rewards in work and family.
He is enough of one quality to be miserable but not enough of the other one to ever have been free. He is no sailor, but he is no city-dweller either. Like Eliot’s Prufrock, he walks along the beach of life, his carefully-pressed cuffed pants just barely damp from the surf.
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