The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
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 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.
Summary
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.
Themes
Art and Communication
"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.
The Limits of Poetry
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.
Nature and the Poet
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.
외로운 추수꾼
보라, 들판에서 홀로
추수하며 노래하는
저 외로운 고원의 아가씨를!
걸음을 멈춰라, 아니면 조용히 지나가라!
홀로 곡식 베고 다발을 엮으며
구슬픈 노래 부르니,
오 귀 기울이라! 깊은 골짜기엔
온통 노랫소리로 가득하구나.
아라비아 사막
어느 그늘진 휴식처의 지친 길손들에게
나이팅게일인들 이보다 더 반가운
노랠 부른 적이 없었고,
아득히 먼 헤브리디즈 열도(列島) 사이
바다의 적막을 깨치며 봄에 우는
뻐꾸기도 이렇듯 떨리는 목소리로
들려주진 못했으니.
누군가 말해 다오. 그녀가 무엇을 노래하는지.
아마도 저 구슬픈 노래
아득한 그 옛날의 불행했던 일들,
오래전 전쟁 얘기를 읊은 것이리라.
아니면 그 어떤 보잘 것 없는 노래,
오늘날의 일상시를 읊은 것일까?
과거에도 있었고 또 다시 있을지도 모를,
어떤 피치 못할 슬픔, 죽음 혹은 고통일까?
무슨 사연인지 모르나, 처녀는 노래했다.
마치 끝없는 노래라도 부르듯.
나는 그녀가 일을 하며
낫 위로 몸을 구부리고서 노래 부르는 것을 보았다.
귀를 기울였다. 꼼짝 않고 조용히.
그리고 내가 언덕 위로 오를 때,
그 노래 소리 이미 들리지 않았으나
내 가슴에 그것은 남아 있었다.
외로운 추수꾼(The Solitary Reaper)
1807년에 발표된 작품으로, 자연과 인간과의 교감을 낭만적으로 노래한 4연의 서정시이다.
윌리엄 워즈워스가 1803년 9월에서 1825년 5월에 걸쳐 스코틀랜드의 북부 고원지대인 하일랜드를 여행하면서 시상을 얻었다고 하며, 시를 쓰던 친구 새뮤얼 콜리지(Samuel Coleridge)와 자신의 여동생 등과 함께 하일랜드 지방을 여행하던 중에 추수하는 아가씨의 노래를 듣게 된다.
노래는 은은하고 서글픈 곡조였는데, 오랫동안 그 노랫소리를 떠올리며 이 시를 썼다고 한다. 하일랜드 지방에서 흔히 들을 수 있는 추수하는 아가씨의 노랫소리를 제재로 하여 ‘인간의 근원적인 고독과 애환’을 노래했다.
추수하는 아가씨의 애잔한 노랫가락에 인생의 애환이 융화된 듯한 상태를 보여주면서, 자연에 순응하고 인생을 연민하는 애련한 감정을 느끼게 한다.
제1연은 추수하는 아가씨의 노랫소리를 듣고 독자에게 그 노래를 들어보라고 하고,
제2연은 아가씨의 구슬픈 노랫가락을 통해 시인의 상상력을 펼쳐 보인다. 대조법을 활용함으로써, 이국적인 정취를 느끼게 하는 상상력이 돋보인다.
제3연은 노래 가사의 내용을 감상하고 있는데, 그것은 옛날의 이야기이면서 지금의 이야기이자 앞으로도 있을 인생의 이야기임을 암시한다.
제4연은 오래도록 시인의 마음에 들려오는 애잔한 가락의 여운을 그리고 있다.
윌리엄 워즈워스의 시 경향을 대표하는 시로서, 한 편의 아름다운 풍경화를 떠올리게 한다.