The first thing a careful reader notices is a small piece of arithmetic. The title promises seven men; the opening line announces five, rowed by two sailors. The count only adds up once we realize that the sailors, who seem at first to be mere machinery, are men too, with minds of their own. That quiet correction is the poem's whole method: it asks us to look again at people we have been treating as background.
What the poem sets out is simple. A group of men share a boat in the dark, and each one is absorbed in a private world. One lies on his back watching the stars and fretting that "we are going" so "very slowly." Another follows the headlights of a car moving along the coast road. A third peers into the water, wonders how deep it is, and tests the temperature with his hand. The fourth looks at the first man and judges him "very foolish." The fifth shuts his eyes and thinks "of nothing at all." Seven people occupy a few square metres of wooden boat, and no two of them share a thought. The central idea is human isolation in close company: physical closeness guarantees nothing about inner connection.
The construction supports this beautifully. The poem is written in plain, unrhymed lines of uneven length, closer to a sequence of calm observations than to song. The rhythm never swells or hurries, which suits the subject, since the boat itself is crawling. Even the syntax is repetitive: "One man... Another man... The third man... The fourth man... The fifth man." This numbered procession feels almost like a census, as though a neutral observer were ticking off specimens. Notice, though, that the pattern is not perfectly mechanical. The fourth man is the only one whose thought is about another person, and what he thinks is a put-down. Even when a mind in the boat does turn outward, it produces judgment rather than understanding. He sees the first man's stargazing and dismisses it, never imagining that the man might be impatient rather than foolish. Misreading, the poem suggests, is what contact often looks like.
The imagery is carefully scattered across directions. One man looks up (stars), one looks sideways to the land (the car's lights), one looks down (the sea), one looks at a fellow passenger, and one looks inward, or nowhere. The boat becomes a small hub from which seven separate lines of attention radiate and never cross. The sea scenes are especially telling. The man who dips his hand in the water concludes it is "no cooler than it had been an hour ago," a wonderfully flat, unpoetic observation, the kind of thing a real person thinks on a real night. The poet resists any temptation to make the voyage symbolic or dramatic. Nothing happens. That refusal is deliberate, and it makes the loneliness more believable, because it is ordinary.
Then the second stanza turns the poem around. Until now the sailors have been grammatical afterthoughts, the means by which the five men are carried. Suddenly "the two sailors looked at the five men," and the gaze reverses. One sailor speaks, offering the only attempt at conversation in the poem: "It's going to be fine tomorrow." The other does not reply. His reason is the most human moment of all: his muscles are tired and he wants to get home. The passengers have been idly dissatisfied with the slow pace, while the man responsible for that pace is quietly suffering the effort of it. The first man's complaint that "we are going very slowly" gains an ironic echo here, because the slowness is someone's labour. Comfort, in other words, has been resting on invisible work, and none of the five passengers knows it.
The poem is significant because it achieves a large observation with almost no ornament. It never states a moral; it simply lets the structure expose one. Seven people share a destination and understand each other not at all, and the ones doing the work are least noticed. A reader who finishes the last line may well glance up from the page and wonder what the people nearby, on a bus or in a classroom, are really thinking.