Within the discipline of Romantic studies, Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ holds an exemplary place. The story recounted by the poem is an archetypal narrative of what has been called the Romantic Ideology. As is typical of ideology, its nefarious influence is assumed to propagate throughout the whole of English language poetry, giving rise in contemporary poetics to mainstream, free-verse late-Romantic poetry such as we find in Seamus Heaney, and the rejection of this model to be found in the poetics of Charles Bernstein. The poem begins with the event of an encounter, ‘Behold her, single in the field / Yon solitary highland lass! / Reaping and singing by herself / Stop here, or gently pass!’ Opting for the first of the two injunctions, the journeying poet listens to her as she sings ‘a melancholy strain’. The reaper sings in a language that Wordsworth does not know which leads him to speculate as to what she may be singing across the middle two of the poem’s four stanzas. ...
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