The poem 'Paper Boats'

Did you ever fold paper into a boat and float it in rainwater? What did you hope would happen to it? The second text in Unit 3 is 'Paper Boats' by Rabindranath Tagore. A child speaks, and everything is small and ordinary, except what the child imagines.

"Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running stream." Here running means flowing quickly.

"In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of the village where I live. I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am." A strange land is an unfamiliar one, not a weird one. The boats are messages: the child wants to be known.

"I load my little boats with shiuli flowers from our garden, and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land in the night." The shiuli is a small white-and-orange flower that opens at night and falls at dawn.

"I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky and see the little clouds setting their white bulging sails." The clouds become boats too, their sails swelling (bulging) with wind! "I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down the air to race with my boats!"

"When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars." Here bury means press (his face into his arms), not cover with earth.

"The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading is their baskets full of dreams." Lading = the cargo a boat carries. So the boats carry flowers by day and dreams by night!

The poem's theme is innocence, imagination and play, and its tone is gentle and wishful, not sad.