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.