A speaker walks alone along a shore, singing or humming to himself, and comes across an old boat left behind. The poem is only five short lines, but it holds a quiet moment of recognition. The boat is compared to "the last drinking horn," which suggests something once used for gatherings, toasts and shared company, now the final survivor of that world. Calling it "green and thin" makes it look weathered, almost fragile, like an object worn down by time and water.
The speaker seems to feel a gentle, wistful kinship with it. He is "alone with my song," and the boat is alone too, a leftover from something that has passed. The title, "Outworn," points to this sense of being used up and set aside. The mood is solitary and elegiac, but not despairing. The poem treats the old boat with tenderness, as if the speaker's song and the abandoned vessel are both small, lasting things on an empty shore.