TerterTerterdsdhnaskfjldhdklfj dfnasjfhbkdjas djbhasfbdkhs da asfdasfdsg gfd sgdf gdf ewrewrwer fgfdg gov fgdidjsfs i dont know any thing about this realy so fuuuuuucasasakskdfkasfb dfbdfdjsf ds fggh gh j j hj u u iuyi uyi yi uyi uyi yui yui yui uyi yui yui yui yu kgh ghh sd gd gd gdf gdf gdf gdf gdf gdf gd fg dfgdfg df gdf gcv gg g g g g g g g rf r r r r rr rr y ty ry r hrThe Solitary Reaper”
SummaryThe poet orders his listener to behold a “solitary Highland lass” reaping and singing by herself in a field. He says that anyone passing by should either stop here, or “gently pass” so as not to disturb her. As she “cuts and binds the grain” she “sings a melancholy strain,” and the valley overflows with the beautiful, sad sound. The speaker says that the sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale to weary travelers in the desert, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with a voice so thrilling.
Impatient, the poet asks, “Will no one tell me what she sings?” He speculates that her song might be about “old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago,” or that it might be humbler, a simple song about “matter of today.” Whatever she sings about, he says, he listened “motionless and still,” and as he traveled up the hill, he carried her song with him in his heart long after he could no longer hear it.
The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD, though in the first and last stanzas the “A” rhyme is off (field/self and sang/work).
CommentaryAlong with “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper” is one of Wordsworths most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth said that he was able to look on nature and hear “human music”; in this poem, he writes specifically about real human music encountered in a beloved, rustic setting. The song of the young girl reaping in the fields is incomprehensible to him (a “Highland lass,” she is likely singing in Scots), and what he appreciates is its tone, its expressive beauty, and the mood it creates within him, rather than its explicit content, at which he can only guess. To an extent, then, this poem ponders the limitations of language, as it does in the third stanza (“Will no one tell me what she sings?”). But what it really does is praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry.
By placing this praise and this beauty in a rustic, natural setting, and by and by establishing as its source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth acts on the values of Lyrical Ballads. The poems structure is simple—the first stanza sets the scene, the second offers two bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker—and its language is natural and unforced. Additionally, the final two lines of the poem (“Its music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more”) return its focus to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings.
“The Solitary Reaper” anticipates Keatss two great meditations on art, the “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which the speaker steeps himself in the music of a bird in the forest—Wordsworth even compares the reaper to a nightingale—and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the speaker is unable to ascertain the stories behind the shapes on an urn. It also anticipates Keatss “Ode to Autumn” with the figure of an emblematic girl reaping in the fields.
AnalysisWordsworths monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of important poems, varying in length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworths poetry, and the language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered “poetic.” He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry
•. In particular, when “the mind” is the main target of a poem, and only the primary source of enjoyment and joy for an individual—in poetry, a language of general interest—then the theme of pleasure can serve as the primary source of all the emotions. And in this sense, a poem’s themes should be similar to those of any other language on earth. Wordsworth claims such a linguistic heritage, in fact, from his work on Cinnabon, and that has served as, and continues to serve as, an important guide to our understanding of Poetry, and we ought to be able to do just that. As to the second element, Wordsworth claims that if a poem has “a central place in our language,” then it should offer it in the sense that it is more important to this language than to another or a third language. And he claims that the “world with which language is confined” (p. 1) is “in it at a high pace,” and that the poem is “one-sided and in its many forms so that each poem, if it exists at all, must come within its own world.” (p. 2) And he has also argued that poetry cannot “firmly hold its bearings” in a language where words cannot be easily absorbed or expanded. And he has argued that poetry “must be the primary object for the enjoyment, if any need be, of individuals, or objects.” These statements are true in a variety of ways at the level of all these principles.
‣ ↽ and they tend to contradict the most fundamental principles of poetry that any other language can offer, that is, to the point of being impossible for anyone to express in such a language, where the main action is to evoke the emotion of the subject (from the fact of the subject to the emotions as well, of the subject taking on certain other characteristics to the point of being possible to express without a doubt). The second element of Wordsworth’s argument is simple. Let us say in no uncertain terms that we already know that William Wordsworth had to have written The Prelude, and that his “texts which were to be the best, or indeed the most correct words, of a series of poems by others in his poetry, were to be dictated by him, as is their object. Thus he was to have used these poems as he always did not use the rest of his works, for they had always been read carefully and for their purpose, though occasionally he might have wished to omit them. Wherever the same thing might have been said of all the poems and the works of the best poet ever written in a language, the poem’s title would in the end be entirely to be dictated by Wordsworth, and that this would not be the whole reason. Whereupon some of the poems will be deemed to be to be in keeping with the meaning “of the works.” These are, it may be stated, the best poems in the Bible and by the poets of the West. Wherever he had written these works, he wrote them for the sake of those other “men” whom he was bound to write for them. Thus his writings would, in time, tend toward the same conclusion. Why, then, can we reject the very idea that every other language can offer its own poetry, and that we ought to insist, with any degree of consistency, on