Exercise 2

1.   The second stanza of The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth, contains two comparisons which tell the reader about the quality of the reaper’s song: the speaker is so fascinated by the girl’s voice that he considers it sweeter than the one of a Nightingale and compares the reaper’s voice to the one of the Cuckoo-birds. The comparisons are used by the poet in order to express the beauty and the joy that this song gives to whom hears it.

2.   The two comparisons have in common with the reaper’s song the same sense of peacefulness and beauty which only Nature is able to convey. So the reaper becomes part of a natural world which creates into the listener emotions and a sense of joy.  Besides the reaper’s song, like the nightingale one, breaks the silent of the surrounding nature creating a sense of curiosity to the listener, who has to make hypothesis on what the reaper is singing about.

3.   The intelligent reader may understand that the speaker is in front of a spring background: the surrounding landscape is blossoming, the birds are singing and the sun is shining. The travelers must stay in a shaded shelter, so the reader may also understand that it’s warm, but in this scenery of heat, there is the sea as well. Water, the symbol of life, safety, purity  and regeneration, gives to the scene a sense of peacefulness and harmony. It seems to be in the Eden garden. The choice of a completely natural landscape as the setting of the poem makes the reader understand the importance that Nature has for the poet, who considers it as man’s source of inspiration and as the only way for him to come in contact with moral and spiritual values.

Exercise 3

In the third stanza the reader learns that the speaker cannot understand the words that are sung, but he can only guess at what she might be singing about. In order to understand the meaning of the reaper’s song, the speaker tries to analyze it starting from the causes of men’s sorrows and pains. He supposes that it might be about ancient events like battles or about everyday family matters or about natural sorrows as death, the only certainty of men’s existence.

Exercise 4

Now I’m going to focus my attention on the language of the poem. Right from the start the intelligent reader may understand that the speaker cannot understand the reaper’s song because she is singing in a dialect which he doesn’t know. So the poem provides the problem of the limitation of language. As a matter of fact he can only appreciates its tone, its musicality and the mood that the song creates inside of himself; he can also perceives the melancholy tone of the beautiful song that is overflowing the valley.