The poem ‘Paper Boats ’ is written by the famous Indian poet, storyteller and dramatist Shri Rabindranath Tagore. He has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1913. The poem is about an innocent child and her dreams. The child plays, down by the side of a stream, she makes paper boats daily and floats them down the running stream She writes her name in big black letters on them.She also writes the name of the village where she lived. She hopes that someone in some strange land will find them and know who she is. Sometimes she also loads the boats with Shiuli flowers (Parijatha flowers) form their garden. The Shiuli flowers always bloom in the early morning when the sun is rising. She hopes that these blooms will be carried safely, down the stream, to some land in the night.
As she launches her paper boats she looks up at the sky and Sees little clouds floating in the sky. The clouds appear to her like the white sails of a boat, bulging in the wind. She wonders who might be her friend in the sky, who sends the clouds floating through the sky, to race with her boats. The girl imagines that the clouds floating in the sky and her boats floating in the stream are running a race.
Every night the little girl sleeps and buries her face in her arms and dreams that her paper boats are floating along the stream, under the midnight stars. She dreams that the fairies of sleep are sailing in her paper boat, after loading them with baskets full of dreams.
