Elements of content
William Wordsworth is a romantic English writer and the author of Ballard’s “The Solitary Reaper,” in which he successfully describes his amazement at the song of a Highland Scottish girl. He merely made guesses of the meanings of the words the girl sung and decided not to look at its theme leaving him to make guesses of the meanings and themes of the tale in the girls’ song.
Paraphrasing the poem
The poem is about a highland girl reaping grain in the fields. As she sings a song, she captivates the attention of a passerby. The song’s bewitching quality is in its notes and tones, leaving the listener engrossed in the endless song whose words he can only imagine.
Analyzing the themes
The main theme in the poem is romanticism. It is in the beauty of the song that the beauty of the girls voice forms the presentation of the melancholic presentation of imaginations left on the listener and transferred to the audience of the poem. In the last stanza, there is evidence of the impact that the singing had on the writer as he maintains that regardless of the time duration that passed by, he could still hear the words and melodies of the singing girl. “The music in my heart I bore, long after it was heard no more”.
There is the use of the influences nature can have on people manifesting its influences in the human mind. It eludes the production of passionate emotions helping individuals to connect social and spiritual worlds with the people spending time in nature like farmers having the chance of maintaining the nobility of natural beauty. The other theme is in the power of the human mind since it is through the memories he has about the singing girl that he manages to write his poem.
It is through the apprehension of the tone of the song that the writer assumes that sad tune of the song means that it could be about a painful historical past such as battles fought from long time. It is also presumable about past sorrows and incidents that do commonplace in everyday life making the song easy to relate with despite his not understand the words.
The tone of the poem
The poet is happy about the singing of the girl such as when he says,”The music in my heart I bore/Long after it was heard no more.” However, his disappointment is in the fact that he cannot understand her words because the girl sung in the local Gaelic Scottish dialect.
Nonetheless, the poet is happy in the line when he describes the effect of the song in him claiming that it was a permanent source of joy. He had the feeling right from the moment he heard the girl singing in the fields and had to stop to listen to her. He enjoys the sweet voice, which he describes to be sweeter than that of the nightingale.
Elements of form
The poet places the poem in a rustic context adorned by natural settings established through the song of a rustic girl all alone in the fields reaping grains. It is in a simple structure, with the first stanza being a setting of the scene and the second stanza introducing a bird companion for musical introduction.
The third stanza details the songs content while the fourth stanza is a description of the effects the song has on the speaker. The final lines of the poem reinforce the power of the mind creating soothing effects of memories and human thoughts.
The poets’ choice of words makes the poem outstanding in the presentation of the song sung by the girl in the fields. He uses the words ‘solitary’, ‘alone’ and ‘single’ on the foreground. By using the word ‘single’, he implies that the girl was alone in the fields.
The word ‘solitary’ expresses the melancholic mood of the poem while the use of ‘alone’ is a reference to the fact that the girl is on her own without assistance from anyone as she works in the fields. In the poem, there is use of two forms of images. There are word pictures used to describe the refreshing melodies of the song sung by “the solitary reaper”
The author uses iambic tetrameter and employs a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d as his rhyme scheme. However, the rhyme “A” is off in the first stanza, but there is a keen focus on the tone of the poem. This is regardless of the fact that the poet is incapable of comprehending the words of the singing girl leaving him to focus on the beauty of the blissful mood created in him. There is spontaneous flow of emotion coupled with expression of praise of beauty.
In the use of alliteration in the poem, the poet uses ‘plaintive’ and ‘perhaps’ to conjure that the song is painful and about the things of the past such as in the place that says “old and unhappy far off things”, (line 22). He remarks that the song has some connection to a historical painful past though he later wonders if the song is merely an association to a solitary daily life of the reaper.
The poet successfully expresses his idea of the painful stories of the finite phenomena guided by imagination. It leads to a successful perception about the boundless eternal melodies of language, which can express and affect the emotions of a listener producing sticking musical expressions of humanity.