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Post by Somak Meitei on Jun 28, 2014 19:29:22 GMT 5.5
In the poem The Solitary Reaper, I have a question that makes me be in a confused state of mind.The things I want to know are:I want to know if the mount on which the poet mounted up after the song had ended is coincident with the field where the lass was reaping; there is reasoning behind the place(s) and how the poet tries to balance nature and man in connection with the poem.
Thanks in advance
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 29, 2014 1:17:11 GMT 5.5
As the first three lines Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself indicate that the singing farmer girl is a "Highland Lass", a Scottish girl (the poet--Wordsworth's "I" is always Wordsworth himself--an Englishman, does not understand the song), it is very unlikely that the girl would work in any other locale than in a farm somewhere hilly in Scotland itself. It is apparently safe to presume that the farm was either in a fold (an area of low land between hills) or on the brae or side of the hill the poet was mounting. Such topographical features and agricultural settlements of both sorts were and still today are usual in Scotland. Lines 27-30 can be read in both ways 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... Line 29 ( I listened, motionless and still) with the terminating semicolon (; ) is meaningful--in Lines 27-29, the girl works in the fold-farm or brae-farm, and the poet started or resumed his climb in Line 30 after the song ended, i.e. either the poet started to mount the hill only after the song ended or he found the girl singing in the hillside field while climbing and stopped to listen to her song and he resumed his climb after the song had ended. In fact the difference does not make any significant difference in the poem's meaning. However, I'm more inclined to picture (perhaps for graphical beauty) Wordsworth espying the lass "cut[ting] and bind[ing] the grain" in the hillside field, and hearing and then stopping to listen to her song incidentally when he mounted the hill. As regards your second query, I ask you to kindly rephrase it. However, as far as I can guess at it, I would like to say in reply that the poem, I think, does not say so much about man-nature relation (if it ever is about this at least partially, though I cannot see this point foregrounded) as about the the appreciation of the expressive beauty of art in general and particularly music in this case, and the mood, the affective effect, it creates in a person as opposed to the explicit content of the lyrics. In fact the poet could not understand the song, the words, sung in Gaelic, Will no one tell me what she sings?—(Line 17) but the melancholic tune had a deep, soul-touching effect on him so much that it sent him wildly guessing at its probable theme: 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? (Lines 18-24) |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 30, 2014 1:48:25 GMT 5.5
In Wordsworth's (7 April 1770 -23 April 1850) early works "nature and mankind are linked but stand for contrasting modes of being". For example, the second stanza of Lines Written in Early Spring (1798) reads: To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man leaving the situation unresolved, while his later works, even including the densely argued Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey composed a few months after Lines Written in Early Spring, work their way through self-doubt to a triumphant resolution. The Solitary Reaper written between September 1803 and May 1805, does not very consciously belong to the latter group while it does not show the traits of the former. In fact, in this poem the maiden's song merges with the hilly locale. W. A. Heard says the singer's voice, like the voice/song of nightingales and cuckoos, "becomes almost a part of nature, working a human sweetness into the landscape. . . We feel the song to be the very soul of the valley." Of course, man is part of nature, and romantic poets particularly are very keenly aware of this relation being the matrix of their life and poetry. When this merger is characteristic of Wordsworth's maturer and later poems, it is not foregrounded enough to be the theme of this (particular) poem. The poem rather is about sound or (even) music * which is not linguistic like any natural souns such as the cries of birds and animals but direct impact on man's soul--perhaps something universal among all animate and inanimate things in nature. * Though Wordsworth's ear was highly organized and sensitive in the highest degree to all the wandering voices and homeless sounds of nature, and while the processes of his mind had the logic of music, his appreciation of music as an art was slight, and he never applied himself, as Browning did, to its study. It is even said this ear was incapable of much musical delight. Thus, the song of the solitary reaper in its simplicity and suggestiveness was almost like the voice of the nightingale or the cuckoo. |
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