George Soule

by George Soule

This paper was first presented at the Wordsworth Winter School in Grasmere,Cumbria on February 22, 2007. I have revised it slightly since them. A song “Recovery” by the Celtic-rock band Run-Rig was played as audience assembled.

I hope you won’t mind my starting on a personal note and adding a few more such notes along the way. I must confess that I hadn’t read a word of Wordsworth until I was almost 19 years old. When I was led to him in a college class, I was stunned. We read a number of the most famous poems, but when it came to memorizing a passage (an assignment, and a good one, that I used through my teaching career), I chose the passage that most captivated me—a passage which included:

A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In springtime from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

This passage was from a later revision of the 1807 text, but I’m sure if the passage in my book had begun “No sweeter voice was ever heard,” I would have memorized it anyway. The passage has had a great effect on me. It remained in my mind as a touchstone of what thrills great poetry can call forth. And when I formally retired from teaching eleven years ago, I gave myself a present before getting to Grasmere for the Summer Conference: I took a tour of the Outer Hebrides. The month was July, and I heard no cuckoo-birds. The weather was very hot, and the seas were not exactly silent. But I was thrilled (that word again) nevertheless.

When writing this paper I worried a little about how some of you might react to an American talking about Scotland. I consoled myself that nobody has openly objected to me talking about the Englishman Wordsworth, so why couldn’t I talk about Scotland? I’ve been to Scotland quite a few times—as far from the border as Aberdeen, Inverness, the Isle of Skye (twice), Oban, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and of course Lewis and Harris, North and South Uist, and Barra. I even have some Scottish blood in me: my great-grandfather came from Dumfries and led Burns night celebrations in the wilds of North Dakota for many years.

So let us turn to “Poems Written During a Tour of Scotland.” This title is not completely accurate. The tour Wordsworth speaks of is of course the trip he and Dorothy (and for a while Coleridge) made, leaving Grasmere on August 15, 1803, and returning September 25. One critic has suggested that Wordsworth wanted to make the trip not only for the usual reasons we all travel, but to gather material and inspiration for poetry; after all, his trips to the Alps and to Wales had inspired him in the past. Yet according to the best information I can get, only two of the poems were actually written during the tour: “To a Highland Girl” and the sonnet “Degenerate Douglas!” “Yarrow Unvisited” appears to have been begun during the tour and finished later. The rest were written between 1804 and 1806, the majority in 1805 and 1806.[1] All but one of these were composed in typical Wordsworthian fashion: the poet mulled over his material for a few years, and then composed poems. (In one case, a poem did not appear until 1842.)

These poems can all be read with pleasure after two hundred years. That’s a lot to be said for any piece of verse or prose, and as a matter of fact I found myself liking the minor Scottish poems more and more as I read them. Wordsworth hits a great range of tones from serious to playful, and his turns of thought are always original and interesting. I want to begin by making rather brief remarks on the seven less remarkable poems, before focusing on the two really memorable poems, “Stepping Westward” and “The Solitary Reaper.”

* * * * *

Perhaps the least gratifying is “To the Sons of Burns,” which Wordsworth tells us was written “after visiting their father’s grave (August 14^th, 1803).” The date is possibly wrong.[2] We know from “Resolution and Independence” that Wordsworth revered Burns, but also that he deplored how whiskey led to his death. This poem, which was written a few years after 1803, is a simple warning to his aging sons to avoid people who want to stand them drinks and not to follow in their father’s path.

* * * * *

“Glen-Almain” is based on the Wordsworth’s experience on September 9, 1803, when he and Dorothy visited a “narrow glen” where they later were told that the poet Ossian was

supposedly buried. Now is not the place to go into the Ossian controversy, but Wordsworth undoubtedly knew that many people doubted that the ancient bard, as resurrected by James MacPherson, ever existed. Nevertheless, Wordsworth was moved by the idea that he might have been buried in that glen. He reflects that it is odd that a poet of battles came to be buried in such a secluded and calm place. The poet then reflects that it does not matter if what he has been told is only a myth. The people who sustain the myth have been moved by the idea of “perfect rest” in such a spot—the rest “of the grave; and of austere / And happy feelings of the dead.” Therefore it is good to think of Ossian as buried here.

* * * * *

The sonnet “Degenerate Douglas” need not detain us long. It was actually written during the 1803 tour; some have dated it the 13^th of September, but it was probably written on the 19^th after Walter Scott told the Wordsworth about the felling of trees.[3] In the octet Wordsworth denounces Douglas, Duke of Queensbury, for letting his “love of havoc” lead him to cutting down a “brotherhood of venerable trees” near his castle. This personification continues in the sestet, in which the poet adds a new and moving idea. Wordsworth say that however much the native people and the present-day travelers deplore the Duke’s action, in the long run Nature

. . . . scarcely seems to heed:
For shelter’d places, bosoms, nooks and bays,
And the pure mountains, and the gentle Tweed,
And the green silent pastures, yet remain.

* * * * *

“The Matron of Jedborough and Her Husband” is another rather simple poem, but again the more I read it the more I liked it. The Wordsworths stayed (along with Walter Scott) at Jedborough on September 20, and Wordsworth was impressed by their hostess—the Matron of the title. What impressed him was that despite her advanced age (73!!!) and her almost comatose husband (he seems to have suffered a stroke), she is vigorously happy and cheerful. (She has the will to live the poet was to honor among the people buried in Grasmere churchyard in The Excursion.) Wordsworth, who was 33 at the time, is overjoyed to see such energy and happiness in an older person, and rejoices too that “Human Nature” can look to old age as

A Land of promise and of pride
Unfolding, wide as life is wide.

There is more to come. Her energy has a real effect. The poet senses that even though the husband seems dead to the world, his wife’s motions and her “buoyant Spirit” affects him: “He tracks her motions, quick or slow.” Then Wordsworth looks more closely at the Matron and sees that despite her energetic behavior, life has been hard for her. Yet the poems ends with a rejoicing in her “second Spring.”

* * * * *

“To a Highland Girl” is based on an experience William and Dorothy had earlier in the tour—August 28, when they were staying near Loch Lomond. Dorothy in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland reports that they met two girls and were impressed by “the beautiful figure and face” of the elder and their general “innocent merriment.”[4] William’s poem, written a short time after their return to Grasmere, makes much the same point. He notes that the elder girl was 14 years old. The girl’s beauty is such that she seems like a dream, yet he rejoices that she is real. She is lucky that she lives in such a sheltered place so “remote from men” that she is “ripening in perfect innocence” without normal feminine shyness. She radiates “freedom” and gladness” and courtesy. She speaks little English. He wishes he could be like a brother or father to her. He does worry, however, what the future might bring, so he prays

God shield thee to thy latest years!
I neither know thee or they peers;
And yet my eyes are filled with tears.

The tears are presumably for what may happen to stain her innocence. The poet then turns to himself and to one of his major themes: “In spots like these it is we prize / Our Memory,” and that he will remember her forever. The Fenwick notes confirm that at age 73 Wordsworth did still remember her.[5]

* * * * *

I have a particular tie to Wordsworth’s “Rob Roy’s Grave.” His real name was Robert McGregor, and he died in 1734. He was an outlaw who plundered the possessions of rich people and thus came to be revered by the poor—much like Robin Hood in England, as Wordsworth points out in the poem’s opening line. His popularity in Scotland was also probably due to his Jacobite sympathies. In America our equivalent is Jesse James—a popular gentleman bandit, a relic of the Confederate army, who was finally routed in September, 1876, in Northfield, Minnesota, where I have lived off and on for 60 years. At any rate, on September 12, William and Dorothy saw what they were told was Rob Roy’s grave. They were wrong; the real grave was nearby, but that does not matter to William’s poem written two to three years later.[6]

After a nine-line first stanza, “Rob Roy’s Grave” is a ballad with three lines of eight syllables and one line of six. It’s tone is surprisingly and delightfully mixed. The introductory long stanza seems to praise Rob Roy by words like “daring,” “brave,” and “Hero.” Yet Wordsworth signals his ambivalence. He evokes Robin Hood and says that “Scotland has a Thief as good.” The next stanza praises his “wondrous length and strength of arm” (Rob Roy did have very long arms) by which he could “keep his Friends from harm”—seemingly a good thing.

Then Wordsworth’s argument takes a different tack. He praises, in a way soon revealed to be ironic, Rob Roy’s wisdom: he was a man of principle. Rob Roy’s principle seems to be that because human laws are false and divisive, he will act on the principles he finds in his heart. Like the beasts of the field,

. . .they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.

. . . . to the measure of his might
Each fashions his desires. . . . .

Tis God’s appointment who must sway,
And who is to submit.

So Rob Roy the powerful can take what he wants from anyone. Some wisdom!

Wordsworth then remarks that because he was defeated by forces of law and order, “He came an age too late.” Then in a wonderful switch, Wordsworth asks “Or should we say an age too soon?” If he were living now, he would not bother with Scottish things, but would turn to the world’s stage, wiping away old institutions (Wordsworth always had a deep sense of mutability), proclaiming:

Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
Obedient to my breath.

So Rob Roy would rule in Britain much as the hated despot Napoleon was ruling then in France.

But then Wordsworth changes his tone and his attitude once more. Rob Roy can at least be praised for loving “the liberty of Man.” If he was living now, he perhaps would act “nobly.” Therefore, the poor of the Highlands are right to honor him.

* * * * *

Dorothy records in her Recollections that on September 18^th, the day before they were to meet Walter Scott, that “At Clovenford, being so close to the [the river] Yarrow, we could not but think of the possibility of going thither, but came to the conclusion of reserving the pleasure for some future time.”[7] I drove alongside the Yarrow ten years ago, and it is indeed lovely. But the Wordsworth’s were intrigued by it as a subject for poetry. Helen Darbishire in her note to this poem tells us that “perhaps no valley in Scotland or England has been the source of so much legend and charm. . . . There are pathetic ballads” and “a great tragic ballad. . . . There are many songs in praise of a beautiful maid, the ‘Rose of Yarrow.’”[8]

The poem itself is a slight, playful performance. Wordsworth intentionally includes some Scottish phrases from earlier Yarrow ballads, especially when he calls Dorothy his “winsome Marrow”—that is not to call her a vegetable but a companion. The companion insists that they have seen so many Scottish rivers that they need not visit the Yarrow: “What’s Yarrow but a River bare . . . .?” The poet replies that he thinks Yarrow is probably very beautiful, but we will not go to see it. “Enough if in our hearts we know, / There’s such a place as Yarrow.” Yarrow unseen, unvisited can remain in our mind as a “vision” or a “dream.” When we are old we can sooth us “That earth has something yet to show, / The bonny Holms of Yarrow.” A typical Wordsworthian theme about the consolations of the imagination.

In passing, let us note that Wordsworth wrote two more poems about the Yarrow. In September, 1814, he finally visited the river accompanied by his wife Mary. He then wrote “Yarrow Visited,” in which he said that although he was sad to lose the ideal vision he had of the river, he was happy that the “genuine image” was just as lovely. He returned in 1831 with his daughter Dora and the dying Sir Walter Scott and reflected with sadness that although the river was unchangingly lovely, human beings change. I like this Yarrow poem the best.

II

Now to the two poems that most critics agree are the finest of this group. “Stepping Westward” takes off from a real experience. Dorothy records in her Recollections that on Sunday, September 11, 1803, while she and William were walking along Loch Ketterine, or as it now is called Katrine, not far from the hut in which they were to spend the night, “we met two neatly dressed women, without hats, who had probably been taking their Sunday evening’s walk. One of them said to us in a friendly, soft tone of voice, ‘What! You are stepping westward?’ I cannot describe how affecting this simple expression was in that remote place, with the western sky in front, yet glowing with the departed sun.”[9]

Wordsworth himself tells us much the same thing in his prefatory note. He calls the women “well dressed.” I think we can assume from what Dorothy tells us of their hostess a page later that the women are in what we would call their “Sunday best.” The date of this poem is significant: Hayden says it probably was composed on June 3, 1805, less than four months after John Wordsworth’s death and only a few weeks after Wordsworth put the finishing touches on The Prelude. In a lecture I delivered two years ago, I built upon what Duncan Wu had written about John’s death in February, 1805. The death caused a great change in William’s outlook, caused him to move beyond the original impulse behind The Prelude and to take a more sober look at what life held in store. He came in my view to a moment of muted theodicy; because of the spiritual preparation described in most of The Prelude, he was able to accept God’s will in John’s death. I think this poem is one of the first evidences of this change—resignation or maturity, call it what you will.

The phrase uttered by one of the well-dressed women in 1803 would be memorable and evocative in any context: “What! are you stepping westward?” (I like Dorothy’s punctuation.) “Stepping westward” is clearly not just literal, though I think the Wordsworths were literally walking west to their hut. It suggests getting on with life in our journey to death. I’ve asked lots of people about this over the past few months, and they all agree. My son-in-law points out that that’s the meaning in Tolkien. I have a guitar-playing friend who wrote a song with a title “Walking West,” and when I asked him what he meant, he said “Death.” The only exception to this universal archetype seems to me Horace Greeley’s mid-19th century call to Americans: “Go west, young man!”

So the poem starts with what really was said on September 11, 1803, on the shore of Loch Katrine. The first stanza is I think unnecessarily complicated, though in a typically Wordsworthian way.

--‘Twould be a wildish destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange land, and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:

I think what Wordsworth says is that, in reply to the question of where he and Dorothy were going, it would be silly to think that they were there simply by happenstance (they were in fact going to a hut where they had stayed before).

Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?

Nevertheless, given the beauty of the sunset, who would stop walking on—even if he did not know where he was going? A nice hyperbole.

But then as we might expect Wordsworth raises the stakes—in two ways. The human contact with the two women of the place was wonderful. “I liked the greeting. . . . The voice was soft, and she who spake / Was walking by her native Lake: / The salutation had to me / the very sound of courtesy: / it’s [sic] power was felt. . . . .” And the human contact was mingled with a heightened awareness of what “stepping westward” meant in his life. It is a “kind of heavenly destiny. He could travel through the “region bright”—the land illuminated by the wonderful sunset--with a spiritual right, a spiritual assurance.

The end of the poem works well, though I am not sure that I can explain it well enough. Wordsworth combines the metaphor of stepping westward into the rest of his life—calmly and confidently after the death of his brother—with the “courtesy” and “sweetness” of the Highland woman who uttered the phrase. As is often the case in Wordsworth, the words are not only heard, but remembered as an “echo” as he moves on in the sunset on that day. But the echo conjures up what lies ahead in the rest of his life.

The echo of the voice enwrought
A human sweetness with the thought
Of traveling through the world that lay
Before me in my endless way.

There is a lovely calm in these lines, a calm enhanced by courtesy and human sweetness.

III

Now to the poem I want most to talk about—“The Solitary Reaper.” At first glance—and this is what I told my students for years—this one of the Scottish poems appears not to be based on Wordsworth’s experience at all, but on a passage he read in the manuscript of a friend. The truth of the matter is more complicated and perhaps impossible to unravel at the distance of two hundred years.

First of all, the friend, who was a man named Thomas Wilkerson, made a tour of Scotland in, I think, the last years of the Eighteenth Century.[10] In her edition of the Poems of 1807, Helen Darbishire, drawing on Wordsworth’s own extensive Fenwick notes, describes Wilkinson as a “Quaker gentleman of delightful character and studious tastes who lived and worked upon a small hereditary estate . . . not far from Penrith.” Sometime after he made his Scottish tour, he wrote an account of it, though it was not published until 1824. Wordsworth met Wilkinson for the first time in 1801 or 1802.[11] In his book Wilkinson wrote that in Scotland he “Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.”[12] In passages near this famous one, Wilkinson tells us that he probably saw the female reaper on one of the many islands in Loch Lomand. Wilkinson also describes how ordinary Highland woman like the Reaper appeared. In contrast to the well-dressed women of “Stepping Westward,” they “dress very lightly; their clothing consists of a jacket, a petticoat, and a handkerchief; in common they wear nothing on their heads or feet. . . . it is no uncommon thing in the severe frosts of winter to see the roads tinged with drops of blood from the naked feet of the inhabitants.”[13]

Wilkinson also tells us what she may have been may have been reaping--corn or oats. The website of the Loch Lomand Tourist Board assures me that several of these islands are large enough to be farmed to this day. Down through history their principal product seems to have been whiskey—perhaps some of which went to Robert Burns. So the reaper herself could have been part of the whiskey-making process!

At any rate, Wordsworth may have read Wilkinson’s manuscript any time after 1802. Wordsworth and Dorothy then toured Scotland in 1803, taking in the atmosphere of Scotland. In her Recollections Dorothy tells us that on September 13 (two days after they encountered two well-dressed women of “Stepping Westward”), she and Wordsworth were at Loch Voil after they climbed over the mountains from Loch Katrine. She writes that “It was harvest time, and the fields were quiet—might I be allowed to say pensively?--enlivened by small companies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the Highland to see a single person so employed.” Scholarly editions will usually give us this quote, implying that as had often happened before, Wordsworth used Dorothy’s writing to stimulate his own. But they don’t mention what Dorothy writes next. Without much of a transition, she quotes “The Solitary Reaper,” which was not written until two years later--1805.[14]

The chronology is unclear. John Hayden, Wordsworth’s editor, believes Wordsworth wrote “The Solitary Reaper” “probably” on November 5, 1805.[15] DeSelincourt emphasizes that Dorothy’s writing about 1803 is not a journal, butRecollections, much of which was written as late as 1806.[16] So Wordsworth’s poem may or may not owe anything to Dorothy’s writing; in fact the influence may work the other way around. Of course they saw some reapers together and probably talked about the incident.

At any rate, we can now see that “The Solitary Reaper” is a thoroughly Wordsworthian poem based on his own experiences in Scotland in 1803 (and probably in 1801) as well as (possibly) Dorothy’s Recollections and certainly her conversation. I think we can say that the poem was then triggered by a beautiful sentence he may have read in November, 1805—or possibly earlier. The poem may well have been gestating in Wordsworth's mind for several years.

It is easy to imagine why Wordsworth was attracted by Wilkinson’s passage. It struck a familiar chord. Just as in the opening paragraphs of “Tintern Abbey,” a wonderful experience (here the song of the Reaper, there the beauty of the valley) is enjoyed when it happened and long afterwards. In “Tintern” the experience gives “sensations sweet” in “lonely rooms” (26-28); in “Reaper” more simply the narrator after Wilkinson says he “bore” the “music in my heart . . . / Long after it was heard no more.” And Wordsworth recognized that Wilkinson’s very words in prose made eloquent poetry—found poetry if you wish to call it so. As he tells us, his last line is taken almost exactly from Wilkinson (Wordsworth changes “strains” to “music” and therefore must change “they were” to “it was.”) Even so, the first and fourth stanzas of “The Solitary Reaper” clearly owe a lot to Wilkinson.

Let us now look at what Wordsworth did with Wilkinson’s material, especially in the first and fourth stanzas. Wordsworth kept the singing and bending female reaper; he kept her unintelligible song (though he didn’t explain why it was unintelligible); he kept the songs melancholy sound and of course the lasting impression it made. But Wordsworth adds more. She is not a “female . . . reaping alone” but a “solitary Highland Lass.” “Highland” is necessary to locate the poem; Wilkinson’s passage was already in a Highland context. “Solitary” somehow makes the girl even more isolated than the simple “alone.” Wordsworth’s “Lass,” however adds a new dimension to the scene. “Lass” has a range of meaning according to the OED: unmarried girl, but more especially a beloved and attractive girl. You can all think of how Shakespeare used the word, and Wordsworth used it elsewhere as well: “Some Sweet lass of the valley” (Prelude, VIII, 38). And one of the Scottish poems of 1807 based on an experience he had a few days before his visit to Loch Voil: as we have seen, “To a Highland Girl” is clearly a modestly erotic tribute to a beautiful adolescent girl. I suggest that this memory eroticized the Solitary Reaper as well, making it appropriate to call her a “lass.”

Note too her song fills a “Vale profound” or a deep valley. Wilkinson’s girl apparently sang on a small island; no deep valleys there. But Wordsworth’s girl sang in the deep valleys of the territory he and Dorothy had been climbing through on the days leading up to their seeing reapers on September 13. Dorothy’s Recollections makes it clear how difficult the climbing was. The Reaper’s song “overflows” the vale—clearly an hyperbole. The vale is “profound.” Profound certainly meaning very deep but with overtones of imaginative significance. Later on in stanza 4, we are told the “Maiden sang / As if her song could have no ending.” Wordsworth is clearly heightening the significance of the Reaper in excess of what he found in Wilkinson. And of course the song could almost have no ending. Wilkinson remembered it, and Wordsworth remembered it for a long time.

I will say more of this heightening soon, but first I must also note the overall calm of the poem. Each of its four stanzas are eight lines long, generally rhyming ababccdd. The lines are generally octosyllabic, except for the fourth lines of each stanza, which have only six syllables. The effect of these short lines are to slow the poem down. All the lines are paced in a measured way; there is very little enjambment. Wordsworth’s account of the experience of the Reaper’s song has none of the excited and almost headlong urgency of, say, the blank-verse opening of “Tintern Abbey” or of the most memorable passages from The Prelude.

Still, although the overall tone of the poem is calm, it is a energized calm. For one thing, in the first stanza echoes many other of his poems that can be called epitaphic in the mode of many of Wordsworth’s early poems. “Behold . . . Stop . . . O listen!”—-these imperatives call the reader to regard the Reaper’s song as important, as demanding attention.

This significance is heightened even more by stanza two. The comparisons of the effect of the nightingale’s song in the desert and the cuckoo’s song in the Hebrides have always seemed just right to me and I assume to other readers, but think of how unexpected they are. Here is a poem about the effect of the song of a Highland lass, and we are suddenly transported far or somewhat far away, in both cases beyond the edges of Wordsworth’s own experience. Wordsworth had traveled to Italy, but not to Africa, to the Highlands, but not to the Hebrides. Now the image of travelers in an Sahara oasis could have come to the poet from any popular reading. A group of people hearing the song of a wonderful bird after a day of difficult traveling is a fine image of the effect of the Lass’s song: it is not only melancholy but sweet and refreshing.

The Cuckoo-bird is a different matter. I asked Duncan Wu about this, and he pointed me in the direction of two books Wordsworth is known to have read: Martin Martin’s A Late Voyage to St.Kilda (1698) and his A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703).[17] In both cases (and you can find these books on the internet), Martin reports that the appearance of the cuckoo in the Hebrides is very rare, but when it does appear and sing, it is a portent. On both St. Kilda and on a small island just off Lewis—the farthest Hebrides indeed!—the cuckoo’s song is said to portend the death of the island’s owner or his steward, or the arrival of a notable stranger.[18] Now I can’t see much of this portentousness in “The Solitary Reaper,” but Wordsworth clearly associated the cuckoo in the “farthest Hebrides” with heightened significance. By this time the cuckoo’s song had become aligned with Wilkinson’s word “sweeter” [I personally prefer his later revision—the one I memorized 50 years ago: “A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard”]. In any case, Wordsworth passage raises the intensity of this sweetness or thrillingness by placing it in “the farthest Hebrides.” But making it break “the silence of the seas” is both wonderful (that phrase is what made me memorize the lines) and puzzling. The sea as far as I know is never silent; I would imagine the Atlantic is usually particularly noisy out there. It was when I visited. Could it be that the sea is silent because there are no humans there to hear it? One of my favorite lines still puzzles me.[19]

So the first and fourth stanzas of the poem set up the basic Wordsworthian situation of personal response to an experience, heightened by Wordsworth’s and Dorothy’s memories of their 1803 trip and by the poet’s address to his reader. The verse in these stanza is quite regular and plain: little enjambment, few figures. What modest figurative language there is can be found in each case in the final couplet (vale . . . overflowing,” “music in my heart”). These final couplets also change the poem’s music somewhat: they move to a preponderance of low, back vowels, suggesting seriousness and closure.

The second stanza heightens the intensity of the experience even more, and in new ways. It is highly figurative, dominated by two (as we have seen) extravagant comparisons. There is much enjambment and in the last four lines a preponderance of bright, front vowels. The most emphatic line of the poem is here: the strong accent and alliteration of “Breaking the silence of the seas” is remarkable. Wordsworth changes his poetic tactics when he writes the intense and lovely second stanza.

The second stanza is where my heart was fifty years ago. Great lines. I love them even today. But let’s move on to Stanza three. Wordsworth begins with the poem’s only question—-one that Wilkinson did not ask: “Will no one tell me what she sings?” We know from Wilkerson that the Reaper sang in Erse, which we assume neither he nor Wordsworth could understand. Wordsworth’s question remains unanswered. No one is there to help, so the poet suggests several topics that the Reaper could be singing about. Let’s look at the last topic first. In the kind of regular and calm verse we see in most of stanzas one and four, he thinks she might be singing of some melancholy, sorrowful, humble, and familiar (that is, ordinary) unhappiness.

Some natural sorrow, loss or pain.
That has been, and may be again.

In these lovely, simple lines, the poet sympathizes with what the Reaper’s life may be like, as he often did with his humble characters in Lyrical Ballads.

But Wordsworth’s first conjecture is more important:

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:

Even my rudimentary knowledge of Scottish history, especially Highland history, tells me that it was filled with unhappy disappointments and with bloody battles. In what was believed of the distant past, Ossian chronicled fierce battles. In recorded history, the Scots often raided England: hence the defensive crenellated tower on St. Oswald’s church in Grasmere; hence the Penrith beacon, from which the young Wordsworth so memorably wandered in The Prelude. For another, English forces often invaded Scotland. Northumberland changed rulers fairly often. But then the Scots fought among themselves: clans vs. royalty, clans vs. clans. My next-door neighbor is a McNeil, a clan who I seem to remember either defeated or were defeated by the MacDonald’s in a famous and bloody battle on either South or North Uist. Most recently for Wordsworth, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army of Highlanders were routed at Culloden in 1745. And Scottish people remember. The music you heard when you entered was by the Celtic rock group Runrig, who bemoaned the clans and the clearances or “clearings.” Now the clans were banned in 1745 and the clearances had barely begun by 1803, but the pattern is there. Ten years ago when I visited the outer Hebrides I sensed this aura of melancholy, of remembrance.

Think of the two lines, the “plaintive” (that is, mournful) lines, the first gently emphatic (five accents rather than four), the second heartbreakingly evocative: “For old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago.” Now in “Tintern Abbey” and the Intimations Ode and The Prelude, Wordsworth was writing about himself. In “The Solitary Reaper,” he gives us the usual personal focus in the framing stanzas. But in the third stanza he goes outside himself and profoundly evokes Scotland itself. My guess is that this turning out was again the result of his personal change after the shock of his brother’s death in February, 1805. “The Solitary Reaper” was written in November. And he was soon to write in “Elegiac Stanzas” about the effect of John’s death: “A deep distress hath humanized my soul.”

One last note. The Reaper here is solitary. The poet, as opposed to his social stance in “Stepping Westward,” is solitary as well. So the poem is not only about Scotland, it is about loneliness. But also note: the Solitary Reaper is singing, and so is Wordsworth.