Summary of “The Solitary Reaper” by William Wordsworth | “The Solitary Reaper” Summary

Study Material and Summary of The Solitary Reaper NCERT Class 9th

The poet orders his listener to see a "lonely Highland lass" harvest and sing alone in a field. He says that anyone who passes by here should stop here, or "pass gently" so as not to disturb her. As she "cuts and binds the grain," she "sings a melancholy strain," and the valley overflowed with her beautiful and sad sound. 

The speaker says that the sound is more welcome than any song of the nightingale for the tired travelers in the desert, and that the cuckoo in the spring has never sung with a voice so exciting.

Impatient, the poet asks, "Will no one tell me what she sings?" He speculates that her song might be on "old, unhappy, distant things and battles for a long time, Could be more humble, "Everything she sings," he says, listening "motionless and motionless," and as he climbs the hill he carried his song with him to his heart long after he More could hear him.

Form
The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme pattern of ABABCCDD, although in the first and last stanzas the rhyme "A" is deactivated (field / self and sung / work).

Comment

With "I Wandered Alone as a Cloud", "The Solitary Reaper" is one of Wordsworth's most famous lyrics. In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth said he was able to look at nature and hear "human music"; In this poem, he writes specifically about the true human music encountered in a beloved, rustic setting. 
The song of the girl who harvests in the fields is incomprehensible to him (a "Highlands girl", she probably sings in Scottish), and what he appreciates is his tone, his expressive beauty, It creates within itself, rather than its explicit content, to which it can only guess. To some extent, this poem reflects on the limits of language, as it does in the third stanza ("Nobody will tell me what it sings?"). But what he really does is praise the beauty of music and its fluid and expressive beauty, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" that Wordsworth has identified in the heart of poetry.
By putting this praise and beauty in a rustic and natural setting, and by establishing as a source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth acts on the values ​​of the Lyrical Ballads. The structure of the poem is simple: the first stanza defines the stage, the second offers two comparisons of birds for music, the third asks about the content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker - And his tongue is natural and not forced. In addition, the last two lines of the poem ("His music in my heart, I have it / Long after it was heard no more") return his attention to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories On human thoughts and feelings.

"The Solitary Reaper" anticipates Keats' two great meditations on art, "The Ode to a Nightingale," where the speaker mumbles in the music of a bird in the forest - Wordsworth even compares the harvester to a Nightingale, and "Ode on a Greek Urn", in which the speaker is unable to determine the stories behind the shapes on an urn, and also anticipates Keats' "Ode to Autumn" with the figure of an emblematic daughter gathering in the fields.