PART 4

“The Solitary Reaper” is a ballad by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and one of his best-known works in English literature. In it, Wordsworth describes in the first person, present tense, how he is amazed and moved by a Scottish Highlands girl who sings as she reaps grain in a solitary field. Composed in 1805, the poem was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Each of its four stanzas is eight lines long and written in iambic tetrameter, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d, though in the first and last stanzas the “A” rhyme is off.

“The Solitary Reaper” is one of Wordsworth’s most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. The words of the reaper’s song are incomprehensible to the speaker, so his attention is free to focus on the tone, expressive beauty, and the blissful mood it creates in him. The poem functions to “praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty, the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion’ that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry”.

At the end of this part, finish the following assignments:

(1) Wordsworth is a poet with an immense range of interests and one who is constantly challenging our habitual ways of seeing things, rather than a simple man who “wandered lonely as a cloud” and looked at “golden daffodils”. Along this line of argument, do you think his “The Solitary Reaper” has the power to force us to look ar the world afresh? If you think so, how would you argue for your belief?

(2) Discuss the theme of the poem.

(3) Give a brief comment on the poem from different perspectives.

(4) Preview Lesson Three My Last Duchess.