The Solitary Reaper赏析

The Solitary Reaper

By:William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

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 shrilling 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 listen'd, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

Notes

1

] Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister had visited the Scottish Highlands in 1803.

Dorothy's

Recollections

for September 13 that year notes:

the fields were quietly -- might I be allowed to say pensively? -- enlivened by small

companies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the Highlands to

see a single person so employed.

the poem's source:

Scotland written by a Friend, the last line being taken from it

verbatim

.

Wilkinson's manuscript,

Tours to the British Mountains

(London, 1824), states:

sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy,

and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more

2

]

Highland

: mountainous region in northern Scotland associated with the Celtic

clans.

7

]

Vale profound

: broad, deep valley between two high ranges; possibly the world

itself, as a place of suffering (OED

conventional poetic diction; cf. Gilbert West's

617-21:

On to the Centre of the Grove they stray'd;

Which, in a spacious Circle opening round,

Within it's shelt'ring Arms securely laid,

Disclosed to sudden View a

Vale profound

,

With Nature's artless Smiles and tranquil Beauties crown'd.

9

]

Nightingale

: a small song- bird, well-known for the male's musical notes in the

mating and nesting season. In Classical myth, the female nightingale is that to which

Philomela, tragically raped and mutilated by her sister Procne's husband,

metamorphoses on carrying out her revenge.

14

]

Cuckoo-bird

: song-bird migrating to Britain in the spring and associated with

renewal. Cf. John Logan's

Brerewood (-1748):

When the wood-pigeons sit on the branches and coo;

And the

cuckoo

proclaims with his

voice

,

That Nature marks this for the season to woo,

And for all that can love to rejoice ...

16

] Hebrides: islands northwest of Scotland in the Atlantic.