A galley is built for open water, yet the men in Dave Bonta's poem can't even get theirs to the sea. They drag it through a gully, a narrow channel cut into the land, and although they set out "thinking to go to sea," they end up rowing on shore. By the last line the whole expedition has drifted into "the garden." The central idea is quiet and comic: big ambitions often shrink into something smaller and slower, and the poem suggests the smaller thing may be more pleasant than the plan it replaced.
The sounds do much of the storytelling. "Galley" and "gully" are nearly the same word with one vowel swapped, and saying them together makes the boat seem to settle into the ditch that holds it. The first line, "The men drag," is only three syllables, short and heavy, and you can almost feel the rope biting. The next line bounces: "their GALley in a GULly" has the lilt of a nursery rhyme, which gently mocks all that effort. There is no end-rhyme and no regular metre, so the poem relies on echo and pace instead.
Line four, "but give over and row on shore," is almost all single syllables, and the stresses pile up at the end like footsteps. "Row on shore" is a small impossibility, since rowing belongs to water. "Give over" is an old-fashioned way of saying "stop," but it also hints at handing something over, a surrender. Still, nothing dramatic happens. There is no storm and no wreck, only a shrug. The poem treats the abandoned voyage as a change of mind, not a tragedy.
Then the poem shifts. The first four lines sit in the present tense ("drag," "give over"), but "It was pleasant to see" slips into the past, and a watcher appears, someone who looked on and approved. This line mirrors line three: "thinking to go to sea" and "It was pleasant to see" are the same length and end on the same sound. In fact "sea" and "see" are homophones, so the wish to reach the wide ocean is traded for the modest pleasure of looking at what is close by.
The last four lines are the strangest. "Benches" can mean the rowers' seats in a galley, but "judges on the benches" also calls up a courtroom. Judges in a boat is an absurd picture, and that may be the point. Solemn figures are pulled out of their usual setting and set down in a leisurely scene. It is only an inference, but galleys have a historical association with convicts condemned to row, so "judges" may carry a faint shadow of sentencing and punishment, quietly turned into a garden afternoon. The grammar floats too. What exactly is "going all afternoon"? The boat, the judges, the rowing? The sentence never says, and without a clear subject the whole scene drifts as slowly as the title promises. The final line, "in the garden," is short and soft, ending on an unstressed syllable like a boat nosing into a riverbank.
The poem is worth reading for how much it does in about three dozen words. It mixes the heroic vocabulary of galleys and seas, the formal vocabulary of judges and benches, and the homely vocabulary of gardens, and the seams between them show. That gives the poem the feel of fragments joined together, with the reader left to find the connection. The result is a failed voyage turned into a gentle joke about slowness. It also leaves a real question. If you spend a long afternoon going nowhere much, in a pleasant place, in company, have you failed? The title "Slow boat" then reads less as a complaint than as a recommendation.