Immigrants by Robert Frost

No ship of all that under sail or steam
Have gathered people to us more and more
But Pilgrim-manned the Mayflower in a dream
Has been her anxious convoy in to shore.

Frost wrote these lines for a pageant at Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower from England. Rando thoughts from Literature World:

”All of the ships (whether sailing vessels or steamships) that have collected people in increasing numbers and brought them to this country have had the Mayflower, with its Pilgrims, as its eager (or worried?) escort to the coast.

We can’t be certain about what Frost really thought of the Pilgrims and of the Mayflower, but we do have the poem, and that’s what we are concerned with. It celebrates the anniversary, of course, but it also celebrates at least two other things: the continuing arrival of new immigrants and the close connection between the early and the later immigrants.

Persons whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower have a reputation for being rather sniffy about later arrivals, but Frost reminds his Yankee audience that their ancestors, the Mayflower passengers, were themselves immigrants.

However greatly the histories and the experiences of the early immigrants differed from those of later immigrants, the experience of emigration and the hopes for a better life link the Mayflower passengers with more recent arrivals.

The poem says, if our paraphrase is roughly accurate, that the Mayflower and its passengers accompany all later immigrants.”