Wordsworth's Poetry

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.

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).

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" anticipates Keats's 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 Keats's "Ode to Autumn" with the figure of an emblematic girl reaping in the fields.