William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the great poet of the Romantic era, defines poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility. It is striking how many of his poems embody this theory, The Daffodils, and The Solitary Reaper being the most pertinent examples.
Imagination and Memory
That inward eye is the
mind’s eye, the imagination, helped by memory to conjure up the very
experience. This recollection inspires the memorable verses, simple in their spontaneity.
‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’
Interestingly, The Daffodils is not just about the flowers, but about how beauty pleases, stays, and inspires. Similarly, The Solitary Reaper is more about the song, not the reaper. The language and images are simple but powerful and extensive-‘field, seas, vale profound, Hebrides effectively highlights the poet's awe at the never-ending song that defies all boundaries. The song is so beautiful that it doesn’t matter ‘whatever’ she sings. Art breaks all barriers, even of language.
Tone
A conversational tone is set in the opening, as Wordsworth invites us to Behold the single, solitary, girl reaping and singing by herself, stressing her isolation-another Romantic characteristic.
The tone gets excited and inquisitive, ‘Will no one tell me what
she sings?’ and ‘O listen!’ The guesses and presumptions are most imaginative making
the description of the song unparalleled: vivid, exotic, musical. Keats’
melodious nightingale is overshadowed; the Biblical Ruth’s sorrow is magnified.
Wondering ‘what she sings’, his mind travels through song, epic myth: ‘old, far
off things’; through history: ‘battles long ago’; from the humble or the
domestic ‘matters of today’, to ‘sorrow, loss, or pain’.
Structure
Each eight-line stanza has octosyllabic lines, and ends with a
couplet, creating music and a sense of vastness, pervasiveness and finality:
O listen! For the vale profound/…echoing with the sound
This couplet voices Wordsworth’s
The belief that he ‘sees the men and the objects of nature as
acting and reacting upon each other. The
song is thrilling, captivating; surely, ‘The still, sad music of humanity’ can
be heard in this melancholy strain. The couplet is again emphatic, musical, and
universal.
Theme
For Wordsworth, a beautiful experience, like that of coming upon a host of golden daffodils, or of listening to a lovely song, becomes a ‘wealth’ added to the treasure box of memory. The recurrent Romantic idea of the immortality of art, beauty, and truth is also expressed:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Conclusion
The idea that life has to go on, one has to move on, is
poignantly presented when he says he mounted up the hill. He is a traveler, who
stopped but must finally gently pass. There are ‘promises to keep/And miles to
go before I sleep’.
The final couplet wraps up the poem, stating Wordsworth’s theory
of poetry:
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more
The poem came into being when the song flashed upon the inward
eye of the poet.
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