1Behold her, single in the field,
2Yon solitary Highland Lass!
3Reaping and singing by herself;
4Stop here, or gently pass!
5Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
6And sings a melancholy strain;
7O listen! for the Vale profound
8Is overflowing with the sound.
9No Nightingale did ever chaunt
10More welcome notes to weary bands
11Of travellers in some shady haunt,
12Among Arabian sands:
13A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
14In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
15Breaking the silence of the seas
16Among the farthest Hebrides.
17Will no one tell me what she sings?—
18Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
19For old, unhappy, far-off things,
20And battles long ago:
21Or is it some more humble lay,
22Familiar matter of to-day?
23Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
24That has been, and may be again?
25Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
26As if her song could have no ending;
27I saw her singing at her work,
28And o'er the sickle bending;—
29I listened, motionless and still;
30And, as I mounted up the hill,
31The music in my heart I bore,
32Long after it was heard no more.
“The Solitary Reaper” is a poem by the English poet William Wordsworth. The poem was inspired by the poet’s trip to Scotland in 1803 with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. It was first published in 1807. In the poem, the speaker tries—and fails—to describe the song he heard a young woman singing as she cuts grain in a Scottish field. The speaker does not understand the song, and he cannot tell what it was about. Nor can he find the language to describe its beauty. He finds that the traditional poetic metaphors for a beautiful song fail him. The poem thus calls, implicitly, for a new kind of poetry: one that is better able to approximate and describe the pure, unpretentious beauty of the reaper’s song.
Look at her, alone in the field, that Scottish Girl by herself over there. She is cutting the grain and singing to herself. Stop and listen to her or walk on quietly. She cuts and gathers the grain and sings a sad song. Listen: the deep valley is overflowing with her music.
No nightingale ever sang more soothing notes to tired groups of travelers as they rested at an oasis in the Arabian desert. The cuckoo-bird never sang with such an affecting voice in the spring, breaking the ocean’s silence around the Scottish isles.
Won’t anyone tell me what her song is about? Maybe she sings so sadly for old tragedies and ancient battles. Or maybe the song is humbler, about everyday things—the pains and sorrows that everyone endures.
Whatever she was singing about, the young woman sang as though her song would never end. I saw her singing while she worked, bending over to cut the wheat with a sickle. I listened to her without moving. And as I walked on, up a hill, I carried her music in my heart: and I still do, long after I stopped hearing it.
"The Solitary Reaper" is a poem about music: the song a Scottish girl sings as she cuts hay with a sickle. Though the poem’s narrator cannot understand what the girl is actually singing about, the girl’s song sticks with him, its melancholy beauty echoing in his head “long after” its sound has faded. In this way, the poem suggests the ability of art to transcend cultural boundaries and even language itself. Art, in the poem, can communicate feeling or emotion even in the absence of concrete understanding. And yet, at the same time, the poem also communicates a bit of uncertainty about whether poetry itself can offer this connection in the way that music can.
The speaker focuses on the transfixing power of the reaper’s mysterious song. He describes her song in elegant and slightly hyperbolic terms: it fills the valley with sound, and she sings “as if her song could have no ending.” He also invites readers to share in his wonder and pleasure, asking them to “Stop here” and “listen.” Yet he can’t actually understand the reaper’s song, and even cries out, “Will no one tell me what she sings?” He is either too far away to make out the words or, more likely, the reaper is singing in Scots (the national language of Scotland, which is closely related to but different from English). He wonders whether she’s singing about some ancient, epic battles or simply the “humble” and “familiar” sorrows of everyday life. In either case, the speaker draws pleasure from the girl’s song despite not knowing its specifics. For the speaker, the power of the reaper’s song transcends cultural and linguistic divisions, allowing the speaker to feel connected to this solitary “Highland lass.”
Since poets often refer to their own art as song, the reader may also take the speaker's reflection on the power of the reaper’s song as a reflection on the power of poetry itself. In the poem's focus on music, the speaker suggests that poetry’s power lies less in its content and more in its rhythm, its music: the sheer pleasure of musical language is a means of connection. Of course, this suggestion puts pressure on the musical qualities of the poem to deliver on this claim. Because the speaker makes this suggestion, the reader may therefore want to pay particular attention to the poem’s form—that is, the way that it organizes language and tries to find music in it.
Careful attention paid to the poem's form reveals something interesting: the poem is actually full of musical conflict. The first four lines of each stanza are roughly a ballad, a low, popular form (and likely the form of the reaper’s song); the next four lines approximate heroic couplets, a more prestigious form in the 18th century. In this way, the poem alternates between high and low forms; it seems almost at war with itself, unable to establish a solid, steady musical structure. This shifting of forms suggests that beneath its celebration of the reaper's song's capacity to transcend cultural boundaries, the poet remains in some way insecure about the capacities of poetry to do the same. The song simply creates the connection. The poem, to a degree, must work to do so. Thus even as the speaker appreciates the transcendent beauty of the reaper’s song, and of art to transcend all boundaries to offer connection, he struggles to capture such beauty on the page.
Despite the power of the reaper’s song, which creates a connection across linguistic and cultural boundaries, the speaker spends much of the poem trying, and failing, to find the language to describe her song. The poem thus stresses the distinction between the speaker and the girl, and between poetry and song: her song—and her life—remains beyond what his poem can represent. Indeed, it is possible to read the poem as being about the failure of poetry, or specifically of certain poetic language, to adequately describe this pure, unpretentious music. In this way, the poem implicitly calls for a new kind of poetry that could better capture the reaper’s song.
The poem begins in the present tense: the speaker asks the reader to “behold” “Yon solitary Highland Lass!” It seems at first almost as though the speaker is out on a hike with someone and is trying to get their attention: “listen,” the speaker commands at the end of the first stanza.
However, the fourth stanza shifts into the past tense: “The Maiden sang / As if her song could have no ending.” The speaker is not in the valley, watching the girl. Rather, he is recalling a particularly beautiful memory. Her music, as he reveals in the poem’s final lines, has haunted him, staying in his heart long after he actually heard it. He’s trying to describe the song to someone who wasn’t there and who didn’t hear the lass’s song with him. There’s thus a struggle at the core of the poem as the speaker must find a way to represent her music in language.
He tries to do this formally: the first four lines of every stanza is in a modified form of the ballad, a form associated with popular songs in English and Scots. The lass is likely singing in this format herself, meaning the form of the poem suggests a kind of affinity between the speaker’s own art and the lass’s music. However, the second group of four lines in each stanza switches into rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets, a high, elevated form, distant from the low, popular ballad. Put another way, as the poem struggles to capture the girl's music in writing, it finds itself unable to do so by mirroring the formal simplicity of that music.
Further, the content of his poem suggests further difficulty inherent in trying to capture music in writing. In the poem’s second stanza, for instance, the speaker tries out a number of traditional metaphors for song. He compares the lass to a nightingale and cuckoo bird. He employs the high diction traditional to poetic descriptions of strange, foreign beauty, invoking “Arabian sands” and “the farthest Hebrides.” But in each case, he admits that the beauty of the lass’s song exceeds these traditionally beautiful things. Her song transcends not only language, then, but also the resources of poetry—at least the traditional resources of poetic cliché. And in the third stanza, the speaker admits that he doesn’t even know what the song is about: it could be about great battles—or it might be about heartbreak.
In two key regards, then, his poetry fails to meaningfully recreate the song he heard: he can’t describe its beauty and he can’t summarize its content. In a way, the poem is a document of its own failure. However, since the speaker has opened the possibility that he might be able to create a kind of sympathy between his art and the lass’s song, the poem might also be understood as a call, or a manifesto: it subtly implies the need for a new kind of poetry, a new kind of poetic language better suited to the task of representing that beauty of the reaper’s song than the traditional, clichéd language at its disposal.
Wordsworth was one of the leading figures of English Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement that swept across Europe at the end of the 18th century. In contrast to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on scientific reason, Romanticism drew on feelings, often provoked by the solitary contemplation of nature. Wordsworth, for instance, described poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” “recollected in tranquility”; in other words, poetry is a calm recollection of intense emotion.
“The Solitary Reaper” is a clear example of Wordsworthian Romanticism, since its speaker reflects on a powerful experience of nature from a tranquil distance. Though he does not know what she’s singing about, the speaker seems to ascribe to the reaper a sort of virtuousness and purity on the basis of her simpler existence and relative proximity to nature. The poem seems to subtly suggest the nobility and honesty of physical labor like that which this girl performs. In doing so, however, the poem reduces the reaper’s participation in human history and politics.
The poem presents two sets of actions. On the one hand, the reaper “cuts and binds the grain / and sings a melancholy strain.” On the other hand, the speaker and the reader “Behold” and “listen.” There is thus an implicit distinction between the reaper and the speaker in terms of their relationships with nature: while the reaper works directly on it, the speaker observes it and her from a distance. She is a participant while he is a spectator.
The reaper is implied to be closer to a “natural” existence than the speaker. In the terms of Romantic thought, she is also therefore implied to be closer to the source of poetry itself, since poetry comes from nature. In “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” the Romantic poet and critic Friedrich Schiller argues that the poets of his time have lost their intimacy with nature. They observe it from a distance and long to recover their proximity to it, whereas early poets participated in it directly. The reaper seems almost a model of this direct participation.
As the speaker admires the reaper’s proximity to nature, however, he reduces her participation in human history and politics. He treats the reaper as something to observe, to draw inspiration from, and something ultimately separate from his world and its concerns.
The poem was written at a time of political and economic upheaval, just after the French Revolution and in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. But in the poem, the reaper works with pre-industrial tools in a landscape unmarred by factories, mines, or railroads. Indeed, in stanza 3, as the speaker tries to imagine what the reaper might be singing about, he allows that she might be interested in politics—but only the politics of the past: battles and catastrophes that happened long ago. The reaper is thus sequestered from the present, from its political and economic struggles. In contemplating her song, the speaker transforms her into something like nature itself: beyond or outside of human history, apt for contemplation.
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
The first four lines of "The Solitary Reaper" announce the poem's broad themes and introduce the reader to its formal technique. The poem begins with apostrophe: the speaker addresses the reader directly, commanding them to "behold" and "stop here." The poem is thus an invitation—an invitation to contemplation. The speaker asks the reader to stand and watch as a Scottish woman—a "Highland Lass"—cuts a field of wheat with a sickle. The speaker uses the present tense throughout these lines. As a result, the reader may feel that they are standing next to the speaker, observing the scene together as it unfolds, listening to the reaper's song. Notably, however, each of the speaker's addresses to the reader are separated from the rest of the line by a caesura: even as the speaker invites the reader into the poem, he marks the reader's distance from the scene he describes.
In these lines, the speaker does not tell the reader much about the lass's song—yet. But the form of his poem may give the reader some hints about the song itself. The first four lines of the poem closely approximate a stanza of a ballad. At the time that Wordsworth wrote "The Solitary Reaper," the ballad was a folk form, in wide use across the British Isles for popular songs and lowbrow verse. It was not a highly literary form like the sonnet or heroic couplets. Instead, ballads often used everyday language to tell unpretentious stories of everyday life and love in the countryside and cities. Further, ballads were often collaboratively authored: one anonymous poet adding a stanza, another rearranging the order of stanzas, a third deleting stanzas or changing the theme, or writing new words to the same melody. Scottish poetry also makes prominent use of the ballad, in print and in popular song. Indeed, it seems likely that the reaper's song was a ballad or a piece of music emerging from the ballad tradition.
Ballads had a standard rhyme scheme and meter—though, as a popular form, these standards were rarely strictly upheld in practice. Traditionally, ballads rhyme in an ABCB pattern (the second and fourth lines rhyme, the first and third do not), with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. The first four lines of "The Solitary Reaper" follow this pattern—almost. They do rhyme ABCB; but the first three lines of the poem are in iambic tetrameter followed by a single line of iambic trimeter. This means that the first four lines of the poem follow the pattern of a ballad, but with an extra foot in line 2—a relatively minor deviation from the standards of a genre whose standards are already loose. The speaker here seems to be imitating the formal dynamics of the reaper's song, in a sense recreating the reaper's song for the reader.
The first stanza of the poem is heavily end-stopped; it is enjambed only in lines 1 and 7. This creates a slow, contemplative reading experience: the reader is encouraged by the end-stops to ponder each line, to dwell on them meditatively. But the speaker also employs a subtle pattern of assonance, particularly on an /i/ sound, to bind together the stanza and keep the reader moving through it.
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
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Get LitCharts A+No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
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.
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
The nightingale is a small, migratory bird native to England. (It winters in sub-Saharan Africa, not Arabia, as the speaker suggests). It is known for its loud and beautiful song—which it often sings at night. It is often invoked by poets. Indeed, it often serves as a symbol for poets themselves: perhaps flattering themselves, they compare their own song to a beautiful bird's warbling. More broadly, the bird is associated with creativity and inspiration, with mourning and passionate speech. This tradition stretches to classical poetry. The Latin poet Virgil compares Orpheus' mourning, after he loses Eurydice to the "lament of the nightingale.” In Renaissance English poetry too, the nightingale is frequently invoked. Using a classical name for the nightingale, Philomel, Shakespeare mentions the bird in Sonnet 102:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days...
Romantic poets like Wordsworth drew upon and expanded this tradition. For them, the nightingale was not simply a symbol for the poet; the bird also served as a symbol for a creativity that exceeds and challenges human power, something just out of reach to which a poet might aspire. The bird's invocation in stanza two of "The Solitary Reaper" is thus complex and historically rich. It is, on the one, hand a high compliment: the speaker suggests that the reaper's song is more beautiful than the song of a bird whose song was proverbially beautiful. On the other hand, the speaker's compliment engages with the history of poetry, a long tradition of poets who compare themselves to the nightingale to valorize their art. That tradition falls short in this case: it does not adequately describe the reaper's song. Through the speaker's specific use of this symbol, then, the poem subtly suggests that the tradition itself needs to be reevaluated and revised.
The cuckoo is a family of birds, which includes several common European songbirds. Like the nightingale, they are known for the beauty of their singing. Unlike the nightingale, they do not migrate—so they are present from the very earliest weeks of the spring. And, fittingly, they are solitary birds, like the reaper herself.
While the above characteristics are probably the primary reasons the speaker uses the bird to describe the solitary reaper, the cuckoo is also widely invoked in European mythology and literature. For example, in Greek mythology, Zeus transforms himself into a cuckoo to seduce Hera, prior to their marriage. As with his use of the nightingale, then, the speaker offers an elegant and complicated compliment to the reaper when he compares her to a cuckoo bird. On the one hand, her song is like a beautiful bird's song. On the other hand, her song is measured against a tradition in European literature.
And yet, as with the nightingale, the speaker asserts that the cuckoo's song is in fact less beautiful than the reaper's. In other words, the speaker finds this entire poetic tradition—and this specific comparison—insufficient to the beauty of her song. That the girl's song is too beautiful to be captured by this traditional symbol, suggests that new traditions, new forms of comparison, are thus necessary to adequately describe her song.
Arabia is a historical region of the mid-east, comprising present-day Saudi Arabia and surrounding regions. Romantic poets and painters often invoke it in their work, using it as a symbol for distant and exotic lands. Further, they often eroticize the Middle East, emphasizing the sensual pleasures of life there. Wordsworth, though, takes a slightly different tack: emphasizing instead the climate, its desert terrain, and the difficulty of traveling across it—as many traders and merchants did during the period. Nonetheless, it remains an exotic and distant locale for an English readership of the 19th century.
Arabia, though, is almost the opposite of the Hebrides, which are mentioned in line 16. Where Arabia is a hot arid climate, the Hebrides, a chain of islands north of Scotland, are maritime and cold. Where Arabia is distant and exotic, the Hebrides are much closer to home. Between the two locales, then, the speaker spans the whole world: suggesting that nowhere in the world can one find a more beautiful singer than the reaper, and, further, that there is no traditional poetic metaphor that is up to the task of capturing the full beauty of the song.
In the first stanza of "The Solitary Reaper," the speaker directly addresses the reader and issues a set of instructions for the reader: "Behold her," "Stop here, or gently pass!" "O listen!" This instances of direct address are examples of apostrophe.
However, this use of apostrophe is, in a sense, deceptive. The apostrophe gives the reader a sense of immediacy and intimacy. It feels as though the speaker and the reader are walking down a Scottish road together; as though the reader might look over their shoulder and see the reaper at work. However, as the speaker reveals in stanza 4, through his use of the past tense, the poem is based on a memory: the speaker is describing a particularly beautiful and haunting memory from his trip to Scotland, not something immediate and present before his eyes. For the first three stanzas, in part because of the use of the apostrophe, the reader believes they are in the present, walking with the speaker. In the fourth stanza, the floor falls away and the speaker reveals that they are actually in the past. The use of apostrophe thus contributes to the power of the memory: it is so haunting that it seems to seep into, to become part of the present.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
The Highlands are a mountainous region in the northwest of Scotland. Because of its many mountain ranges, the area is scarcely populated—and is known instead for its natural beauty. It includes the Hebrides, a chain of Islands off the northern coast of Ireland. It was traditionally a Gaelic speaking region of Scotland, though by Wordsworth's time the predominant language in the region was Scots—albeit a form of the language strongly influenced by Gaelic. Despite its geographic isolation, the region was bound culturally and economically to the rest of the British Isles, trading in black cattle and whiskey, and exporting its distinctive tartan-pattern kilts, which became a fashion craze in the 1820s across Europe.
“The Solitary Reaper” is—almost—a ballad. A ballad is a traditional genre of English poetry. It is not a high literary genre like the sonnet or the sestina. Instead, it was largely used for popular poetry and in tavern songs. For much of the history of English poetry, the ballad has held the status of a folk form. Ballads were also popular in Scottish poetry; indeed, it seems likely that the song that the reaper is singing in the poem—whatever it was—would’ve been a ballad. Ballads usually alternate between lines of iambic tetrameter and lines of iambic trimeter. This is called common meter. They are rhymed ABCB, which means that the second and fourth lines rhyme, but the first and third don't. They have no constraints as to the number of lines—and, as they traveled through taverns and were printed on broadsheets, they often expanded and contracted, as many authors added and then cut new stanzas.
Wordsworth’s poem closely imitates the standard ballad—and also deviates from it. For example, it does alternate iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines. But instead of doing so every other line, it does so once a stanza: the fourth line of each of the poem’s three stanzas are in iambic trimeter; the rest of the lines are in iambic tetrameter. In a ballad, the fourth line would usually be in iambic trimeter—but so would the second. For a popular, folk form like the ballad, this is not necessarily a serious sin. Most ballads are irregular in one way or another; the rules of the form are rarely precisely observed. In Wordsworth’s case, however, the poem’s formal deviations may serve to underline its implicit questions and concerns. The poet tries to imitate a popular, folk form. But his imitation falls flat. Through the poem’s form, then, Wordsworth seeks to create an affinity or connection between his poem and the reaper’s song that the poem is attempting to capture. And he dramatizes his failure to so.
Similarly, the first four lines of each stanza are rhymed either ABCB or ABAB, more or less a standard rhyme scheme for a ballad, but the next four lines switch into couplets, rhymed CCDD. These rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets closely echo an elevated literary form, called the heroic couplet.
What this means is that each stanza of the poem, and the poem more generally, starts out looking and sounding like a ballad, but fails to follow exactly the traditional formula. It ends up sounding much more elevated and elite. There is thus a conflict between high and low, popular and elite, forms baked into the poem: the poem switches between the two without deciding which mode of writing is superior. This inconsistency again suggests that the poem is struggling to capture the song that it seeks to describe, and its "code-switching" from low to high forms is a sign of its struggle.
“The Solitary Reaper” alternates between two meters: iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Most of the poem is in iambic tetrameter; while each stanza also contains a single line in iambic trimeter, the fourth line of each stanza. The poem thus comes close to, but fails to observe, common meter—the meter most often used in English ballads. In common meter, iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines alternate. The first and third lines of each stanza are in tetrameter; the second and fourth in trimeter. The ballad and its meter were used in popular songs; it was primarily a folk form. In Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempted to claim it as a literary form, as they worked to use the unpretentious speech and simple verse forms of everyday people in poetry.
In “The Solitary Reaper,” Wordsworth seems less sure that such a project can succeed: the poem calls into question the extent to which poetry can adequately capture the reaper’s song—which was itself, most likely, a ballad. The meter—which flirts with but ultimately breaks from the expected common meter of a ballad—signals this failure, embodying both the poet’s attempt to affiliate his art with folk forms and his inability to do so. In the final four lines of each stanza, the poem switches into iambic tetrameter couplets. This form closely recalls the heroic couplet—a form prized in the 18th century by elite, learned poets like Alexander Pope. For Wordsworth's early readers, who would've been well-schooled in Pope's meter, the poem would've been a strange and disorienting metrical experience, alternating between a failed ballad and failed heroic couplets. (The iambic tetrameter lines Wordsworth employs here are one foot short of the iambic pentameter line that is the standard for heroic couplets). The poem seemingly cannot decide whether it wants to affiliate itself with high or low forms and thus switch between the two at regular intervals.
The meter is loose and conversational throughout. The poem contains many substitutions, especially trochees (stressed-unstressed) in the first foot. For instance, the first four lines of the poem all begin with a trochee, before settling into the unstressed-stressed iambic rhythm:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
These first foot trochees do not significantly disrupt the rhythm of the poem. Indeed, they add to its sprightly rhythm: closer to the rapid patter of natural speech than the sometimes tedious flow of an iambic meter. The most significant metrical variation in the poem is thus its deviation from the expected rhythm of a ballad.
Each stanza of “The Solitary Reaper” is eight lines long. These eight line stanzas may be divided in half, yielding two four-line units.
What this means is that each stanzas rhyme scheme is internally divergent; they each contain two separate rhyme schemes.
Another way to put it would be to say that the stanzas are composites, in which two rhyme schemes have been combined. This composite rhyme scheme is potentially significant for the interpretation of the poem. The opening four lines of each stanza follow the standard rhyme scheme for a ballad, which traditionally rhymes in a criss-cross patter in four line units:
ABCB DEFE etc.
The poem, and each stanza, begins by generally looking and sounding like a ballad—but then deviates from that pattern, falling into couplets, a rhyme scheme associated less with popular song and more with polished, intellectual, upper-class poetry. The poem’s varied rhyme scheme thus marks its distance from the ballad—the solitary reaper's song—that it imitates and describes.
For the most part, the poem uses perfect rhymes: strong and clear, unhesitating. There are two important exceptions. In the first and third lines of the poem, the speaker rhymes “field” and “herself”—or tries to rhyme them: even in a generous account, these words do not rhyme. The poem thus opens with a moment of awkwardness as the poet struggles to find a language adequate to the music he heard from the lass. Similarly, in the first and third lines of the fourth stanza, the rhyme breaks down; the speaker offers “sang” and “work” as end-words, an awkward and unrhyming pair. This is a significant disruption: the failed rhyme suggests that there is some opposition between singing and working. Needless to say, this opposition does not exist for the reaper, who sings as she works: it is a limitation of the speaker’s own relationship with song.
These two breaks in the rhyme come in structurally similar places in the poem: the first and fourth stanzas both describe the reaper herself (while the second and third stanzas try to describe her song). In these breaks, the poem most closely resembles the rhyme scheme of traditional ballads: as though the poem starts out in close sympathy with the reaper and then falls away.
The speaker of “The Solitary Reaper” is an anonymous traveler, who has recently been to Scotland. The speaker withholds much vital information about himself: the reader does not know his age, his class, or his nationality. The reader does not know the reason for his trip, whether business or pleasure.
All these details are withheld from the poem to emphasize the reaper’s song: the poem focuses closely on the song, trying to find a language to describe how it sounds. The reader nonetheless can make some inferences about the speaker, based on the way he describes the song. First, the speaker is educated: he deploys a series of literary allusions (and almost clichés) in his attempt to describe the reaper’s song. Second, the reader may surmise that the speaker is not Scottish: he does not understand the reaper’s song, which was presumably sung in Scots, the national language of Scotland at the time. The speaker, then, is a foreign presence, distant from the things he describes; however powerful the song, he returns to a life far removed from its singer.
Finally, because Wordsworth himself took a trip to Scotland in 1803 and wrote the poem shortly thereafter, many readers have assumed that the speaker is Wordsworth himself. If this is true, the poem’s implicit reflections on the powers—and failures—of poetry become sharper and more urgent: Wordsworth was, at the time he wrote the poem, engaged in a series of important battles over how to write poetry, what poetry should (and shouldn’t be). “The Solitary Reaper” may engage in these debates, reinforcing Wordsworth’s own arguments for a poetry that uses, as he wrote, “the language really used by men."
The setting of “The Solitary Reaper” is complex, two-fold. At first, the poem seems to be set in a rural region of Scotland, in the early part of the 19th century. (Indeed, it was composed after the poet visited Scotland with his sister in 1803). It describes a rural world: valleys and grain, sickles and fields. The speaker of the poem seems to be observing that rural world directly, describing what he sees immediately in front of him.
However, the switch to the past tense in the poem’s final stanza suggests that the truth may be more complicated. As the speaker reveals in the poem’s final lines, he is describing a memory. Though he tells the reader about his experience in Scotland, he is elsewhere, some other part of England—from which he reflects on his travel.
The poem thus has two settings. On the one hand, there is the scene that it describes in detail. On the other, there is the place that the speaker describes it from, a place he doesn’t describe—though he makes it clear that it is distant and different from the Scottish countryside. Much of the poem’s energy and anxiety derives from the discrepancy between these two settings: the poet attempts to recapture in poetry the innocent agricultural world he has left behind—and, in important respects, he fails to do so.
“The Solitary Reaper” was written at the height of Romanticism, a literary movement that began at the end of the 18th century and stretched into the mid-19th century. Romanticism is broad and complex. It emerged, in part, as a response to the European Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that stressed rationality and classical order. By contrast, the Romantics valorized emotion and irrationality. They glorified medieval texts and traditions instead of classical precedents—and they often put a strong emphasis on folk forms. They sought pleasure in emotions that the Enlightenment had suppressed, such as horror, terror, and the sublime—often finding such emotions in the overwhelming beauty of the natural world.
Wordsworth was one of the leading figures of British Romanticism, particularly in the early period of his career. Wordsworth’s Romanticism is arguably less intense and highly wrought than some of his contemporaries. He is rarely interested in terror and awe. Though he argues that poetry derives from the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” that emotion must be “recollected in tranquility” in order to make art. In other words, Wordsworth acknowledges that powerful emotion is necessary for poetry, but he also stresses a remove, a retreat from the emotion itself: the poet requires a bit of distance in order to process his emotions and make them into art.
Wordsworth's affiliations with Romanticism are often felt most strongly in his interest in folk forms. In Lyrical Ballads (1798), co-written with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth attempts to use “the language really used by men” in his poetry, avoiding the high diction and classical allusion that had clotted much poetry produced in the 18th century. Similarly, he employs forms like the ballad: folk forms, mostly used for popular songs and broadsheet verse. Against the classicism of 18th century poets like Alexander Pope, Wordsworth uses everyday language and everyday forms to talk about humble, unpretentious subjects. “The Solitary Reaper” might be described as a collision between these two ways of writing. It employs a modified ballad form and it describes a quotidian agricultural scene, finding great beauty in that scene. (And it does so at some distance, reflecting on the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ ‘in tranquility’). But it also tries to do so with traditional, classical poetic techniques—for instance, comparing the reaper to a “nightingale.” The failure of this language to adequately describe the reaper’s song supports Wordsworth’s broader project: to argue that the traditional ways of English poetry have become clichés, and that such poetry cannot capture this lovely but unpretentious rural scene. A new kind of language and a new kind of poetry will be necessary, the poem suggests.
“The Solitary Reaper” was written in 1803 or 1804, following a trip Wordsworth took to Scotland with his sister Dorothy. It was published in 1807. The poem thus belongs to an important, transitional period in English political and economic life. The radicalism of the French Revolution (1789-1799) had collapsed into terror and murder. While its idealism had initially attracted many young English intellectuals, its failure turned them away. In the first decade of the 19th century, Wordsworth himself was beginning to retreat to a more cautious, conservative political position—a position he would hold for the rest of his career.
At the same time, England was undergoing important economic transformations, with the rise of the First Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760-1840). As the use of steam and water power increased, many jobs which were previously done by hand began to be performed by machines. For many rural populations, whose income had relied on the older forms of manual labor, this transition was disastrous. In the early years of the First Industrial Revolution, the English countryside emptied out, vast populations moving to urban centers, seeking employment in the new factories, often for a fraction of the wage they had previously made. The result was widespread unemployment, vagrancy, and social unrest. As Marjorie Levinson argues in “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tinturn Abbey,’” Wordsworth was deeply aware of these social transformations and witnessed the displacement and homelessness they caused in his travels around England. However, he often consciously suppressed the evidence of such social discord, removing beggars and the homeless from his accounts of English landscapes and rural life. His poems are thus often nostalgic, yearning for a pre-Industrial way of life. “The Solitary Reaper” may be said to participate in this nostalgia. The reaper uses traditional tools. She works in a landscape without factories or railways, unmarred by the rapid industrialization going on elsewhere in the British Isles. And though the speaker speculates that her song may engage with political struggle, he imagines it simply as “old, unhappy, far-off things”: her music does not engage with the political struggles of her own time. The poem thus may be said to work to suppress its own historical and economic context.
Manuscript of "The Solitary Reaper — A digital reproduction of the original manuscript for "The Solitary Reaper," currently in the holdings of the British Library.
Biography of William Wordsworth — A brief biography of Wordsworth from the British Library, with extensive links to other articles on aspects of Wordsworth's life and thought.
Reading of "The Solitary Reaper" — A reading of "The Solitary Reaper" from Pearls of Wisdom
The Romantics — An article on the history of British Romanticism from the British Library.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads — Wordsworth's preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, in which he lays out his theory of poetry and his relationship with Romanticism.