The Solitary Reaper Art and Culture Quotes

The speaker directs our attention to the wonderful sight of the woman singing and working all by herself. The woman is the speaker's double: a fellow, solitary poet all alone out in the middle of nowhere.

The rhyme on "grain" and "strain" is important. Art and labor—song ("strain") and farming ("grain")—go together. Maybe the woman's beautiful art only exists when she is farming. Maybe true art can only be produced when some type of labor is happening (like farming).

It really seems like the speaker has found himself in some kind of natural amphitheater. The "vale" is like an echo chamber that perfectly reflects the woman's song. If the speaker were from Colorado, he would say the whole scene reminds him of this.

The speaker really is at a loss for words. Well, not really, but he has a hard time describing the woman's song. All he really tells us is that it doesn't sound like any other songs he's ever heard.

The speaker does the same thing that he did in lines 9-12: tells that this woman's song is more thrilling than anything else anywhere ever. (Okay, he doesn't say it in those words but that's what he means.) The subtext is: you could travel to the ends of the earth (symbolized by the Hebrides) and not find anything so thrilling.

There it is again, the combination of singing and working. These two things go together like butter and toast. Maybe art really is born from hard, backbreaking labor.

Music, poetry, song—these things are really powerful. The speaker is floored. He is "motionless and still," almost as if he were died. Yikes—the power of this woman's song is almost scary.

The speaker is definitely moved. There's no doubt about that. He keeps the woman's music in his "heart" because that's his way of telling us that he has had an emotional response to the song, not an intellectual one. (If that were the case he would have said something like "the music in my head I bore.")