The solitary reaper

the solitary reaper WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

1. ENGLISH LITERATURE

2. "The Solitary Reaper" - William Wordsworth

3. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850): British Poet. Born April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth , Cumberland, in the Lake District. He made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. William Wordsworth is generally regarded as one of the most important English Romantic poets. 3

4. William Wordsworth is generally regarded as one of the most important English Romantic poets. He belongs to the socalled first generation of Romantic poets . In 1791 he graduated in Cambridge. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of France and Italy and spent a year in France. It was during this period that he became a supporter of the French Revolution. Later he became disillusioned with the Revolution and turned very conservative. 4

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6. ABOUT THE POEM: The poem was written on Nov 5, 1805 and published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes. It is written in four stanzas of eight lines each. most of it is in iambic tetrameter – four unstressed and four stressed syllables in a line. The rhyme scheme is sometimes abcbddee or ababccdd . 6

7. DETAIL ABOUT POEM:   The poem is based on someone else’s experience Wordsworth was inspired by a passage written by Thomas Wilkinson, a traveler, during his tours in the book ‘Tours to the British Mountains’ The passage that inspired Wordsworth is as follows: ‘Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse (the Gealic language of Scotland) as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more’ (as quoted in The Norton Anthology English Literature). 7

8. SUMMARY: “The Solitary Reaper" 1

9. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ tells of the poet’s hearing a woman reaping in a field on her own. She is Scottish – a ‘Highland lass’ – and appears to be singing a song in Scots Gaelic, which is why the English Wordsworth cannot understand what she sings. However, he admires the beauty of her song, comparing it favourably with the cuckoo singing in spring or a nightingale delighting weary travallers in Arabia. The poet asks, “Will no one tell me what she sings?” He speculates that her song might be about “old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago,” or that it might be humbler, a simple song about “matter of today.” Whatever she sings about, he says, he listened “motionless and still,” and as he traveled up the hill, he carried her song in his heart long after he could no longer hear it. 9

10. CRITICAL ANALYSIS: It's difficult to imagine  Wordsworth's poetry  without connotations to nature and the natural life. The  poem  is a picture of rustic life and its poignant beauty. The speaker recounts his experience of chancing upon a humming maiden who was Fall appears as a theme as well as of critical importance. Fall or autumn signifies the end of summer and beginning of winter. It’s a season of harvesting, but it’s also a season of endings. Just as it brings joy in the form of harvest yet it also marks the beginning of the end of the year. Metaphorically, it’s the last stage before death. Death as a reaper with a sickle is a popular trope in literature and mythology. In this case, the poem is representative of the inevitability of death. reaping crops alone. 10

11. THANKS. 11