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The Solitary Reaper – an analysis

OCTOBER 7, 2015OCTOBER 7, 2015 / PRERNABVYAS
“The Solitary Reaper”

Summary

The 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.

Form

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).

Wordsworth uses several poetic devices in “The Solitary Reaper.” Among them is apostrophe,
which is defined as a figure of speech where the speaker of the poem addresses a dead or absent
person, an abstraction, or an inanimate object. At the beginning of the poem the speaker invites
the reader to “Behold, her single in the field,/ Yon solitary Highland Lass!” He further cautions
the reader to “Stop here, or gently pass!” Although the reader is not present, the speaker’s
imperative to “behold” the girl at her work puts the reader vicariously in the company of the
speaker, as if they were walking the Highlands together. After the first four lines, the speaker
shifts his attention away from the implied presence of the reader and does not allude to it again.

Metaphor, another common poetic device, is also found in “The Solitary Reaper.” The poet uses
metaphor to compare two images without explicitly stating the comparison. For example, in the
second stanza the speaker compares the song of the reaper to those of the nightingale and
cuckoo. Although the three songs are fundamentally different from one another, they become
metaphors for transcendence as they suggest to the speaker distant times and places. Because
the maiden’s song is in a language unknown to the speaker, he is freed from trying to
understand the words and is able to give his imagination full rein. The bird-songs and the girl’s
song are thus intertwined, a further link of the maiden to nature.

Suggestion through imagery is also used in connection with the reaper herself. The poet offers
little description of her beyond the bare essentials given in stanzas 1 and 4. All the reader
knows is that the reaper is a simple peasant girl singing a rather sad song while harvesting
grain in a field. However, the speaker’s imaginative associations make her much more. He
connects her with shady haunts of Arabian sands, the cuckoo and the nightingale, the seas
beyond the Hebrides, epic battles, and the common human experiences of sorrow and pain.
From his perspective, she becomes the center of the universe, if only for a moment. Like her
song, she dwarfs time and space, to become a metaphor for the eternal.

Music is also a dominant image in the poem. It is reinforced by the ballad form whose tones,
rhythms, and rhymes emphasize the lyrical feeling. The musical image is further underscored
by the use of alliteration. The repetition of s sounds, which are threaded throughout the poem,
lends a tonal unity to the piece. For example, in the first four lines of the first stanza, fourteen
words contain s. This pattern is repeated in the other stanzas but decreases toward the end of
the poem as the reaper’s song releases its grip on the consciousness of the speaker.

Commentary

Along with “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper” is one of Wordsworth’s 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 poem’s
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” is about the power of the imagination to transform common, everyday
events into representations of a larger reality. To the Romantic poets, imagination was not a
synonym for fantasy. Instead they saw it as closely allied with intuition and emotion. This
faculty enabled the poet to see familiar things in a radically different way. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, a Romantic poet himself and a friend of Wordsworth, noted that “the grandest
efforts of poetry are when the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a
strong working of the mindthe result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the
substitution of a sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image.” The aim of the
Romantics was to express an abstract idea using concrete images that were usually drawn from
nature.

The poem is an example of the commonplace pointing the sensitive observer toward an ideal of
unity or completeness of being. Although the reaper is a flesh-and-blood person, she becomes a
spiritual gateway for the speaker of the poem. The natural environment that surrounds her only
heightens her mystery. Her simple song is an expression of her own heritage and background,
yet the speaker imagines it to be an articulation of the eternal, the boundless, the ultimate
reality. This intuitive impression of the infinite leaves the speaker a different person than when
he first encountered the girl. The wonder of her song permeates his intellect and lingers in his
heart long after he hears the last notes.

Wordsworth’s conviction that the infinite can be encountered in the finite emerges from his own
personal experience. Frequently when he walked alone in nature, he detected a pervading
presence, a consciousness that would break into the ordinary moments of his life and turn them
into flashes of revelation. In addition to “The Solitary Reaper,” Wordsworth’s The Prelude and
“Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey” offer examples of poems that reflect
intense instances of mystical insight as well as the sometimes uneasy, sometimes joyous
response the poet had toward these visionary experiences. In “The Solitary Reaper”
Wordsworth celebrates such illuminating moments. The girl, her song, and her natural
surroundings combine in a unified whole and contribute to the speaker’s expanded vision of
reality.

For modern readers, whose lives overflow with activity, the theme of encountering the
transcendent in nature or through everyday events may at first seem strange. Since many
people have little chance to walk in the woods or stroll through farmland, readers might be
tempted to dismiss Wordsworth’s poem because the setting and situation do not reflect their
own experiences. Although the values, concerns, and lifestyle of Wordsworth’s time were
different, the yearning of the human spirit to feel connected to something larger than itself
remains as strong today as it was during the nineteenth century. Modern people long for a quiet
place to recollect themselves, a place where they can catch a glimpse of the eternal in the details
of their lives. Thus the theme of transcendence in “The Solitary Reaper” is timeless, as it speaks
to the needs of the human spirit.

Quote #1

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain; (5-6)
The woman’s song is very close to nature. The rhyme on “strain” and “grain” tells us that for
sure. “Grain” (a plant) goes with “strain” (a song). Lots of poets have said that art and nature
are opposed to one another, but here they are totally vibing.

Quote #2
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound. (7-8)

The “Vale” can’t get enough of the woman’s song. It is literally overflowing with the sound of it,
as if the natural world were also an ecstatic spectator.

Quote #3
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands: (9-12)

The natural world is full of singers, like the nightingale described here. While the reaper is very
close to nature (she lives and works in the fields), she’s not quite a part of it. Her song is way
different from the bird’s song.

Quote #4

A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides. (13-16)

As in lines 9-12, despite the solitary reaper’s special relationship to nature, she’s still not quite
one with it. Her song is different than the cuckoo-bird’s song, way out there near the Hebrides.
The implication is that you could travel “way out there” (to the Hebrides) and still not find a
natural counterpart.

Quote #5

I saw her singing at her work,

And o’er the sickle bending;— (27-28)

She’s singing, and she’s bending over her sickle. Like we saw in lines 5-6, art and nature are
very close here. It’s like she can’t sing if she’s not engaged with the natural world.

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English, IGCSE
LITERATURE , POEM , RESOURCES , SOLITARY REAPER

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