Post date: Sep 17, 2011 12:32:54 PM
Row, Row, Row, Your Boat
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Meaning
The lyrics have often been used as a metaphor for life's difficult choices, and many see the boat as referring to one's self or a group with which one identifies. Rowing is a skillful, if tedious, practice that takes perfection but also directs the vessel. When sung as a group, the act of rowing becomes a unifier, as oars should be in sync for the progression of a rowboat. The idea that human beings travel along a certain stream [time] and suggests boundaries in the path of choices and in free will. The third line recommends that challenges should be greeted in stride while open to joy with a smile. Some have questioned the song's implied necessity to row one's boat downstream. This may in fact be a commentary on the paradoxical nature of time's arrow with respect to man's free will in a universe of materialistic causality.
The final line, "life is but a dream", is perhaps the most meaningful. With a religious point of view, life and the physical plane may be regarded as having equivalent value as that of a dream, such that troubles are seen in the context of a lesser reality once one has awakened. Conversely, the line can just as equally convey nihilist sentiments on the meaninglessness of man's actions. Philosopher George Berkeley said it: a life is just a dream, one of God's many. With or without God, "life is just a dream" expresses the idealistic side of the non-decidable mind-body problem, of which the materialistic side, the "American" sense of reality, is the other: the naive view that the brain through the senses perceives reality "as it is".