A Word on a Word in a Word in William Wordsworth’s THE SOLITARY REAPER

Abstract

Noting a second break in the poem’s pattern in the last stanza, he asserts that “it can hardly escape notice that the first and third lines of stanza four [which end with ‘sang’ and ‘work’, respectively] also are not rimed,” a fact that he claims “unquestionably secure[s]” the “brilliant effect” of the speaker’s shift from present tense to past tense at the end of the poem (76). Similarly, while J.H. Prynne does not consider the first stanza to be a break in Wordsworth’s pattern (it “violates no expectation since at the start no pattern has been established”), he does assert that the last stanza’s deviation from the poem’s “normal” rhyme scheme “lodges strongly” in the reader’s mind the odd moment in which the speaker sees—rather than hears—the reaper “singing at her work” (87). Astute as their observations may be, Hardy and Prynne are perhaps too preoccupied with the end of the poem to notice that the first stanza’s lack of an abab rhyme also draws our attention to a crucial moment of burial that’s akin to—but isn’t quite—what John Shoptaw calls “cryptography,” writing in which “verbal material not (wholly) present in the poetic text” is echoed by a “marker” that “add[s], subtract[s], scramble[s], change[s], or scatter[s]” its components (223–225). Unlike, say, the lines “[r]olled round in Earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees” from Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in which “rolled” and “trees” act as the marker and the notion