Performing "The Solitary Reaper" and "Tears, Idle Tears." - interpretive versus aesthetic literary criticism

Criticism, Spring, 1996 by Kerry McSweeney

This explication can be buttressed by examining the three substantive changes that Wordsworth later made in the text of the poem that Dorothy transcribed in November 1805: in line 10, "More welcome notes to weary bands" replaced "So sweetly to reposing bands"; in line 13, "A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard" replaced "No sweeter voice was ever heard"; and in line 29 "I listened, motionless and still" was substituted for "I listened till I had my fill." In the first two revisions, the incipiently sentimental sweetness taken over from the source passage is removed. Wilkinson's epithets "sweetest," "tenderly melancholy," and "delicious" all carry the suggestion that the reaper's song is "a tale of pleasing woe," to use the phrase Keats applied to Byron's "sweetly sad" melody.(20) But something rather stronger is suggested by "thrilling" and by "welcome notes" to "weary" travellers. And "till I had my fill" suggests dessert rather than deserts, quantity rather than quality, and satiety rather than the receptive intensity of "motionless and still."

Another felicity of this last revision is that it removes any indication of why or when the speaker stopped listening to the song and continued on his way. There is "literal precision" in the line "As if her song could have no ending": the song is "one of those Gaelic... chants that go on and on like the droning of a bagpipe."(21) But there is a figurative level as well: the suggestion of a continuation of the expanding spell of the song, the music of human suffering and endurance continuing into the future--into other vales and other times. At the same time, in the dying fall in the ing rhymes ("ending"/"bending") there is the impression that the singing is growing indistinct; and in the repetition of "sang"/"song"/"singing" there is a sense that the song is becoming detached from its temporal setting and becoming part of psychic time for the listener. This level of suggestiveness is intensified in the poem's closing lines, in which "the music" (itself a more general and inclusive term than song) is said to continue to resonate internally long after it has ceased to be audible.

This process of internalization had been adumbrated in the middle stanzas of the poem. As Earl Wasserman noted, while the last stanza returns to the scene described in the first, there is "an essential difference" between the two. In the intervening stanzas the maiden's song "is stretched out in space... and in time," losing its specificity and becoming "quasi-spiritual." This is the precondition for passage into the "inner consciousness" of the Wordsworthian speaker: "the object is perceived vividly, usually with great specificity; the husk is then dissolved; and when the phenomenon has at last become `spiritualized' it passes into the core of the subjective intelligence."(22) As Wordsworth was to explain in the 1815 Preface: the imagination, "either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses [enables it to] re-act upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new existence."(23)