Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth

The poem Solitary Reaper has been composed by the nature poet William Wordsworth. He was a person whose poetic tendencies glorified the beauty and the greatness of nature. In most of his creations nature has been given the altar and he weaves around this central theme a picture in which man and his connection with his surroundings are given a very important role. After having known the fatalities and inconsequential nature of bloodshed due to his involvement in the French Revolution, he tried to seek solace in the arms of nature. In this poem the poet comes across a lonely highland girl in the highlands of Scotland. She was engrossed in reaping her field and while doing so she hummed a very pleasant tune.
The poet Wordsworth comes across this lonely highland girl in one of his ramblings across the Scottish countryside. She was a country girl who was oblivious of her surroundings while she was reaping the corn field. She hummed such a rapturous melody that the poet was captivated and bewitched by the hypnotising quality of the tune. The poet found the tune very captivating and it overwhelmed his senses to the degree that it felt as if the entire valley was overflowing with the melancholic strain. The melodious strain had a haunting quality which seemed to reverberate in the vales and echo continuously in his heart. In the subsequent paragraphs the poet draws parallels of the song with that of a nightingale. In his candid comparison he seems to prefer the sweetness of the girl's voice to that of the bird. He eloquently delineates the soothing quality in the highland girl's tune by concluding that it is more comforting than the voice of the nightingale who sings for weary travellers in the Arabian sands. The poet finds the girl's strain more soothing than the invigorating voice of the cuckoo whose melodious voice infuses joy and life in the lifeless plains of Hebrides during spring. In the third paragraph the poet contemplates the lyrical content of the song which blends so well with the tunes that it produced a rapturous and overwhelming quality in the song. He contemplates if the song is about great wars fought long ago or about common dealings of day to day life or whether it is about some natural sorrow which had happened in the past and might repeat itself again in the future. In the last paragraph the poet paralysed and lost in his deep thoughts about the lyrics of the song is jolted back to reality by the song again and he concludes that he doesn't care anymore what the maiden was singing about because the song had such an effect on him that he completely understood it from his heart but was unable to explicate. His heart had found a profound liking for the melancholic strain and it captured it forever for the times to come. In the end due to time and circumstances the poet had to resume his journey across the countryside but he carried the rapturous tune in his heart. Although physically he never heard the song again after he resumed his ramblings, the poet's mind had become a vessel wherein her strain reverberated forever.