4

Lyrical modes

Paul Alpers

This essay concerns the way the term "mode" is used in literary
criticism, and is conceived as lying somewhere between two areas
pertinent to this volume: literary theory as a model for music
criticism and genre theories in literature and music. It is unlikely
that what I say will be a model for the analysis and interpretation of
music, but I hope that it will interest interpreters of music. As for
genre theory, the concept of mode enters literary discourse partly
as a way of dealing with certain impasses that arise from thinking
in strictly generic terms, and it may be that some real analogies
with musical analysis will be evident. Whatever these may be, I
will not try to say anything about the musical term "mode."
Having worked my way through Harold Powers' article in the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Vol. 12, pp. 376—450), I
know enough to leave to others the discovery of possible relations
and analogies.
In literary studies, the theory of genres often seems a whirligig
of reifying and hair-splitting, but in work of the past few decades
there is something of a shared sense of what is meant by a genre.
Most theorists and critics do not now use the term for the
ultimate categories - the most familiar of which are narrative,
drama, and lyric - which Goethe called Naturformen and which
include all that we mean by literature. Genres are now generally
agreed to be historical phenomena, and there is a tendency to
think of them as well demarcated, both historically and aesthet-
ically. Genre is sometimes defined as a principle of matching
matter and form or a way of connecting topic and treatment;
these definitions understand the term in a way which is most
usefully formulated by Wellek and Warren, in their Theory of
Literature. "Genre should be conceived," they say, "as a grouping
of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form

59

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 60 Paul Alpers
(specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude,
tone, purpose)." 1
Identifying genre by both "outer" and "inner" features corres-
ponds to our intuitive sense of the term and reduces the confusion
caused by the fact that generic characteristics tend to be of many
different sorts. It does, however, make for an emphasis on literary
kinds that are particularly well defined. Wellek and Warren single
out the Gothic novel as "a genre by all the criteria one can
invoke": "there is not only a limited and continuous subject-matter
or thematics, but there is a stock of devices . . . [and] there is, still
further, a Kunstwollen, an aesthetic intent." 2 The genres which one
now encounters in criticism and theory tend to be as well defined as
the Gothic novel - for example, the eighteenth-century descriptive
poem, the detective novel, and the medieval pastourelle. If any-
thing, there is a bias toward genres that are narrow and circum-
scribed, and it is not surprising that the multiplying of entities
has led to the concept of "subgenre."
For our purposes, the distinction between genre and subgenre is
unimportant. What matters is the principle that a genre (and a
fortiori, one of its subdivisions) is a specific, definable, readily
identified literary form: one that has clear superficial features or
marks of identification and that is sufficiently conventional or
rule-governed to enable us to say, for example, that a given work is
a pastoral elegy or a Petrarchan love poem or a verse satire or a
Plautine comedy or an encomium, and not another thing. But if we
conceive genres this way, then it seems there are a number of
literary types which have generic-sounding names but which are
more inclusive and general than genres proper. Among these are
tragedy, comedy, novel, romance, satire, ode, and pastoral.
Literary pastoral, for example, includes not only the whole range
of formal eclogues - pastoral elegies, love complaints, singing-
contests, and the like - but also pastoral romances, pastoral lyrics,
pastoral comedies, and pastoral novels. Hence it has become com-
monplace to say that pastoral is not a genre, but a mode.3
1
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 2nd edn. (New York, 1956), p. 221.
On matching matter and form, Claudio Guillen, Literature as System (Princeton, 1970),
p. I l l ; on connecting topic and treatment, Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind:
Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973),
p. 29
2
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 223.
3
See the survey of modern definitions of pastoral in David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral:
Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven, 1983), esp. pp. 33-35.

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 Lyrical modes 61
But what do we mean by calling a literary type a mode? The
answers to this question are very vague, and at times seem to be so
on principle. Paul H. Fry has the following to say about "ode" as
the name of the poetic type that concerns him:
The reason why the words "elegy" and "satire" seem more usefully to rope off
poetic kinds than "ode" does is that "elegy" and "satire" are modal terms that
allow enormous flexibility of reference. They describe orientations but tend not to
prescribe a set style, form, or occasion - or even, necessarily, a set theme. It is in
the loose spirit of such terms that I propose the "ode of presentation" as a mode.4

It is, if anything, an understatement to speak of the "loose spirit" of

modal terms. There is positively a tradition of not defining the
concept. You will not find a definition of "mode" in Angus
Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode or in Earl Miner's
books on seventeenth-century poetry, The Metaphysical Mode and
The Cavalier Mode, or in the introduction and selections of a recent
anthology of criticism called The Pastoral Mode.5 The definitional
plight of this term is unwittingly summed up by one critic, who
says, "A work's mode, then, let us say, is whatever it seems to be in
its most general aspect."6
When critics do define "mode," they tend to equate it with
"attitude." The critic last quoted goes on to say: "In general, . . .
the mode of a work will be largely a matter of attitude or tone
rather than style or form of writing." A prominent theorist of
narrative proposes that the "primary modes of fiction" derive from
the way fictional worlds "imply attitudes." He emphasizes that "in
this modal consideration," terms like "tragedy" and "comedy"
"refer to the quality of the fictional world and not to any form of
story customarily associated with the term." 7 Mode is taken to
refer to feelings and attitudes as such, as distinguished from their
realization or manifestation in specific devices, conventions, and
structures.
If mode really is an "inner" matter of attitude or philosophical
conception, then it is hard to see how it can be continuous with the
concept of genre, in which "outer form" is of the essence. But in
fact the term is preeminently one that connects "inner form" and
"outer form," indeed treats them as inseparable. We can see this
4
Paul H. Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, 1980), p. 5.
5
Bryan Loughrey, ed., The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook (London, 1984).
6
Allan Rodway, "Generic Criticism," in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, eds.,
Contemporary Criticism (London, 1970), p. 94. The sentence quoted below is on p. 95.
7
Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven, 1974), pp. 132-33.

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 62 Paul Alpers
not by gleaning statements from theoretical discussions, but by
examining the way the word is used in practice. To take just one
example, Helen Vendler invokes it to qualify her paraphrase of a
section of Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar."
Such a paraphrase of the poem does not reveal its mode . . . The poem is not tragic,
but drawn and wry . . . Rhythm is practically abrogated; rhyme is prohibited;
syntax seems reduced to the simple declarative sentence . . . rhetoric is cramped
to simple indication . . . "And" is dropped from the language. The sentences
stand like epitaphs, in strict autonomy.8

Vendler's main attention is on qualities of diction, syntax, and

rhythm. These are not represented as expressing an attitude, but
rather as somehow encoding it, as having an attitude implicit in
them. It is precisely this sense of literary language — that there is a
reciprocal relation between usages and attitude - that makes critics
invoke the term "mode" to give a summary sense of a work or
passage. It is the term to use when one wants to suggest that the
ethos of a work informs its technique and that techniques imply an
ethos. In practical criticism, the idea of "mode" connects outer and
inner form; it assumes that form and content entail each other and
cannot, finally, be separated. This is the sense of the term that is
registered when Josephine Miles says, "We should look for a new
mode where a new complex of idea, material, and structure clearly
began," 9 or when Richard Cody observes of Tasso's Aminta that it
went "far enough to establish the pastoral as a whole literary
mode, with an ethos and style of its own." 10
Miles's and Cody's remarks show an awareness of what a mode
is, but they do not constitute definitions of the term. For that we
must turn to the most important treatment of the concept, the
chapter of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism entitled "Historical
Criticism: Theory of Modes." Frye says:
In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody,
if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can
do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the
author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may
be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater
than ours, less, or roughly the same.11

8
Helen Hennessy Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (Cambridge,
Mass., 1969), p. 130.
9
Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), p. 115.
10
Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastorialism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's
"Aminta" and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford, 1969), p. 78.
11
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 33.

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 Lyrical modes 63
Frye goes on to specify five modes - myth, romance, high mimetic
(epic and tragedy), low mimetic (comedy and the novel), and
ironic - according to the hero's stature in relation to other men and
to the environment of other men. After surveying these fictional
modes, as he calls them, Frye turns from "the internal fiction of the
hero and his society" to the relation between writer and audience
or writer ar\fl reader. "There can hardly be a work of literature,"
he rightly observes, "without some kind of relation, implied or
expressed, between its creator and its auditors." 12 He then outlines
a scheme of five "thematic modes," which have the same rationale
as the "fictional modes."
Frye himself never tells us why he calls these categories "modes."
But we find an explanation in Angus Fletcher's wonderfully illumi-
nating comment on the idea that fictions may be classified accord-
ing to the hero's power of action. "The term 'mode' is appro-
priate," Fletcher says, "because in each of the five the hero is a
protagonist with a given strength relative to his world, and as such
each hero — whether mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic,
or ironic — is a modulor for verbal architectonics; man is the
measure, the modus of myth." 13 On the basis of this formulation, we
can define mode in the following way: it is the literary manifestation, in
a given work, not of its attitudes in a loose sense, but of its assumptions
about human nature and our situation in the world. This definition
provides the question we implicitly put to any work we interpret:
what notions of human strength, possibilities, pleasures, dilemmas,
and so forth are manifested in the represented realities and in the
emphases, devices, organization, pleasures and so forth of this
work? The key to these questions, as Fletcher says, is the implicit
view of the protagonist's or speaker's or reader's strength relative to
his or her world. I specify all three of these figures, because we need
not maintain Frye's separation of fictional and thematic. He distin-
guishes the two for theoretical reasons, but as he himself says,
"every work of literature has both a fictional and a thematic
aspect."14
12
Ibid., pp. 52-53.
13
Angus Fletcher, "Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism," in Murray Krieger,
ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (New York, 1966), pp. 34-35.
14
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 53.

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 64 Paul Alpers

II
The term "mode" properly refers to the interconnection of usages
and attitudes, but, as my account has suggested, it can be used in
two different ways. It can be an inclusive term, a way of grouping
satires or pastorals or romances in ways that go beyond generic
specifications but that still make for coherent associations and
distinctions. It can also be used as a summary term in practical
criticism, drawing together the various elements that go into the
interpretation of a particular work. My emphasis will be on the
force and scope of three poems, and I will thus be using "mode" as
a term of practical criticism. But these analyses are compatible
with - and could be used in - locating each of these poems in one of
the numerous modes of lyric. With the purposes of the present
volume in mind, I have chosen poems that one can imagine being
set as songs, and I want to begin with a comparison of two
seventeenth-century poems, George Herbert's "Vertue" and
Robert Herrick's "To Daffadills":
Vertue
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season'd timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.15

To Daffadills
1. Faire Daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone:
As yet the early-rising Sun
Has not attain'd his Noone.
Stay, stay,
15
The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), pp. 87-88.

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 Lyrical modes 65
Untill the hasting day
Has run
But to the Even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will goe with you along.
2. We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet Decay,
As you, or any thing.
We die,
As your hours doe, and drie
Away,
Like to the Summers raine;
Or as the pearles of Mornings dew
Ne'r to be found againe.16

These poems have a good many likenesses, which is what makes

them comparable, but they also seem very different, and it is that
felt difference - which in the case of these poems has no evident
generic basis - that prompts a literary critic to discriminations of
mode. Both concern innocent phenomena that show the evane-
scence and mortality of the natural world. They share a set of
images - the day, flowers, springtime - which taken together
represent mortal loveliness and which inform the thematics and
structure of both poems. The poems also have in common the
rhetorical device of addressing the attractive but fragile realities
that engage them. And yet the two poems are strikingly different.
The most important difference is the one registered by the title of
Herbert's poem and by its last stanza. A reader might at first say
that Herbert, unlike Herrick, points a moral. But if we are
extracting morals, Herrick's poem has one of its own to draw about
human life, and it is not that different from Herbert's. Rather, it is
the tender pathos of "To Daffadills," as the title suggests, that
makes it different from "Vertue."
We can begin by considering the stanzas of the two poems. (We
might remind ourselves that given the whole range of lyric - which
includes Pindar's odes, Petrarch's canzoni, Donne's major love
poems, and Keats's odes - the stanzas of both these poems are
small-scale and could even be called delicate.) Herbert's stanzas
give an impression of regularity, which is due not simply to verse
form but to every aspect of lyric rhetoric. The effect comes partly
from the repetitions at the beginning and end of each stanza, but
16
The Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (London, 1965), p. 125.

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 66 Paul Alpers
also from the relation between sentence structure and the line-
ation of the verse. The lines are almost all end-stopped; there is
very little tension between the grammatical elements of each sen-
tence and the way they are disposed in lines of verse; and there is a
strong pause, due to both syntax and verse rhythm, after the
second line of each stanza. This stanzaic rhetoric, as we may call
it, encodes or expresses the spiritual firmness that is praised in the
last stanza. A similar firmness is conveyed by the poem's rhetoric
in the ordinary sense of that term - the way it establishes a
relation to the objects of its address. The attraction and solicitude
registered in the first two lines of each stanza are converted, in the
third line (where the main verb occurs) and in the refrain, into the
uniform and severe sentence of mortality. The last of these
moments brings together the two rhetorics, of verse form and of
utterance:
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
By contrast, the verse form and rhetoric of "To DafTadills" suggest
a very different strength relative to the speaker's world. The
middle lines particularly are determined by the brief cursus vitae of
the flowers. Two of the lines are only one foot long, and the
grammar sustains the effects of fluidity and evanescence, which are
thematized in the short lines, "Has run," "We die," and "Away."
The speaker seems thoroughly assimilated to the flowers he
addresses; even the way the poem refines its pathos - turning the
weeping that begins the first stanza into the moral that begins the
second - can be thought to be determined by the delicacy of the
daffodils.
So far as I know, no seventeenth-century settings survive for
either of these poems. Both, however, seem eligible for musical
setting, and presumably these settings would reflect the character
of the poems as we have described and differentiated them. Our
literary analysis so far has been fairly elementary, and therefore
implies only elementary musical consequences - of the sort, let us
say, that characterize the relation between words and music in
popular song. As we continue to analyze the two poems, the modal
question of strength relative to world will enable us to see their
literary complexity. I hope this analysis will suggest — though I will
not attempt to substantiate it - their interest as texts for art song.
What I have in mind is not only the expressive powers of art song,
but also the various ways, as Lawrence Kramer has discussed them,

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 Lyrical modes 67
in which the music of art song can contest the texts it sets, or seek
out their tensions and dilemmas.17
In "Vertue," I have suggested a fairly direct equation of rhe-
torical and spiritual firmness. But the last line quoted, "My musick
shows ye have your closes," shows that the poem is more interest-
ingly entangled in its sense of strength relative to world. We have so
far taken the line to mean simply, "my verse makes your endings
clear." But in seventeenth-century English, "close" also means
"musical cadence." This second meaning - which is unavoidably
brought to mind by the phrase, "my musick" - suggests that not
only the poet's physical being but also his poetry is subject to
mortality. The implication that the speaker's firm conclusions
share the mutability of natural things affects the poem deeply and
intimately, not just as a moral point to be registered. To represent
the death of natural beauty as a sequence of musical cadences
means that a sense of vulnerability is central to the poem's rhetoric.
The pathos of "The dew shall weep thy fall tonight" and the
lavishing of the word "sweet" in the third stanza are only its most
evident manifestations.
How does the poem negotiate the tension between spiritual
vulnerability and firmness? It claims that they are compatible by
joining them in the climactic phrase, "a sweet and vertuous soul."
("Virtue" in the seventeenth century meant strength as well as
moral goodness, a meaning brought out by the comparison to
"seasoned timber.") It has sometimes been felt that the poem does
not succeed in joining these qualities - by Coleridge, for example,
who quoted this as an exemplary poem but omitted the last
stanza.18 If the poem does not split in two this way, it is because it
everywhere displays and engages its double sense of human
capacity. On the one hand, there are the weeping dew of the first
stanza, with more than a hint of self-representation, and the
confrontation between the rose and the "rash gazer" in the second,
where energetic rhythm and enjambment momentarily disturb the
poem's regular lineations and betray, as Helen Vendler says, the
passion underlying it.19 Over against these are the manifestations

17
Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1984), pp. 125-70.
18
Biographia Literaria, ch. 19; ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, 1983),
vol. 2, p. 95.
19
Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 14. I am much
indebted to Vendler's reading of the poem, though my interpretation differs from hers in
some respects.

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 68 Paul Alpers
of firmness we have already noted. As Vendler says, "This is a voice
which 'never gives'." 20 But there is something odd about this as a
lyric voice: its speaker does not represent himself in the first person.
The only use of the first person is the possessive in the phrase, "my
musick." In displacing the first person pronoun by this phrase, the
poem suggests that the speaker's self is not prior to its utterance,
but resides wholly in the various gestures and orderings of verse
and rhetoric. It is for this reason, one would think, that the voice
never gives. But music has order because it has its closes: in this
poem, at least, it cannot escape the condition of the mortal who
makes it. It is still "my musick." Hence the apparent turn away
from mortality in the final stanza still contains the tensions that
occasion the poem. The last stanza makes a new music by its
variant placing of what was the initial word "sweet" and by
reversing the refrain, which now speaks of living. Furthermore, the
turn to general statement in the last stanza can be said to thematize
the absorption of the first person into an impersonal music. At the
same time, however, there is a strong sense of spiritual drama, most
noticeable in "But though the whole world turn to coal" - that
crucial third line, where the moral of mortality is sounded in each
of the preceding stanzas. The general, apparently impersonal
statement is made to have the feeling of personal recognition and
resolution. The full voicing felt in "Then chiefly lives" makes the
poem decisive in its close, but it also bears witness to the urgencies
that make this a mortal music.
The complicating element in "To Daffadills" is registered in
"Stay, stay," the first of the one-foot lines and the only one that
does not directly represent the evanescence that the speaker shares
with the flowers. In its voicing and its metrical virtuosity (a long
one-foot line - spondaic monometer?) it bears witness to a distinct
human need, both resisting the flowers' evanescence and seeking to
join it. This human presence is more elusively represented at the
end of the first stanza:
And, having pray'd together, we
Will goe with you along.

This looks like the pathetic fallacy, but wit counteracts the senti-
mental fancy of actually praying with the flowers. Since the first
person subject of this poem is from the first a plural "we," all these
lines need mean is that when we humans have prayed together, we
20
Ibid., p. 19.

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 Lyrical modes 69
will accompany you flowers to our common destination. This may
still seem pretty willing to indulge the pathetic fallacy, but the lines
are underpinned first by the fact that it is a main function of church
services to prepare the soul for death and second by the fact that we
need imagine accompanying the flowers only into night and sleep,
the images of death. It is the felt likeness between humans and
flowers, not a naively assumed identity, that gives authority to the
moral statement: "We have short time to stay, as you." Hence, the
fullness and formal satisfaction of the stanza can counteract,
without contradicting, the haste the middle lines thematize: the
stanzas make a stay. They make plausible the notion introduced in
the second stanza, that our brief lives can be imagined not as mere
transience, but as a genuine space:
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet Decay,
As you, or any thing.

The somewhat paradoxical locution "short time to stay" is magni-

fied into "as short a Spring," where despite the adjective the season
is longer than any unit of time previously envisaged. The next line
again allows a spatium, as well as a cursus vitae: it represents decay
not as a process but as something met (like Even-song and the
flowers) by the erotic eagerness first expressed in "Stay, stay" and
here by "quick."
The sense that the poem conceives and represents a human space
is confirmed by the images that close it:
We die,
As your hours doe, and drie
Away,
Like to the Summers raine;
Or as the pearles of Mornings dew
Ne'r to be found againe.

The summer's rain suggests the flowing away of our life, but also
adds another season to its conceived duration. It is associated with
the moisture of tears but it also leads to their transformation in the
final image. Herrick's and Herbert's poems overlap in this detail.
The dew weeping the end of the day is the first of the speaker's
self-representations in "Vertue," and the one most expressive of his
vulnerability. The oblique self-representation leaves room for the
sense that he has strengths in reserve. The greater sense of fragility

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 70 Paul Alpers
in "To Daffadills" is evident from the beginning, where the
explicitly human weeping over natural loveliness suggests that
lyric capacity goes no farther than the tender encounter of men
and flowers. Yet the powers implicit in human separateness are
made evident in the image of "the pearles of Mornings dew." This
line recalls our weeping at daybreak, but, by returning us to the
beginning of the poem, it also provides formal satisfactions. Just as
the fluent middle lines of each stanza lead to greater rhetorical
stability and a sense of closure, so the human tears that flow at the
outset are transferred to the natural scene and become precious
objects, these pearls of dew. Their beauty both reflects and resists
the sense of transience that prompts our tears but that we can
memorialize in a poem.
The next poem I want to discuss engages musical issues differen-
tly from "Vertue" and "To Daffadills," which I have imagined,
though I have not analyzed, as potential song texts. Wordsworth's
"The Solitary Reaper" has an important role in the excellent and
illuminating chapter on song, which I have already mentioned, in
Lawrence Kramer's Music and Poetry, Kramer presents the poem as,
in a sense, the reverse of a song text. For him it shows how music's
tendency to efface text by voice, which he calls overvocalizing, can
invade poetry itself as an imagined effect of music. In some
Romantic poems, he says,
the poet hears a song that assumes epiphanic power precisely because it is
unintelligible, and often at the very point where it passes the threshold of
intelligibility . . . The poet's imagination is initially aroused by the impulse to
insert his own words in the linguistic gap opened by the song. Once in place, these
words gradually dissolve like the song's own, leaving the poet mute and trans-
fixed, usually in a posture of intenser listening.21
The question is whether this generic plot is enacted by the poem
itself:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
21
Kramer, Music and Poetry, p. 139.

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 Lyrical modes 71
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings? -
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending: -
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.22

We can focus our attention, as Kramer does, on the third stanza.

The possibilities stated there are what Geoffrey Hartman calls
"surmises": not mere speculations or reflections but imaginings
that are caused by something striking or mysterious and that retain
something of the troubling power that prompted them.23 The
question is how the poem represents and conveys these surmises.
Kramer wants it to exemplify a "large-scale rhythm of verbal effort
and exalted release from it," and he therefore speaks of it as
attaining "a speculative rapture, an epiphanic act of hearing." He
thus emphasizes what he calls "the imaginative overflow" of the
third stanza: "the near and the far, past and present, heroic and
humble all blend together as the possible subjects of the song." 24
But blending and overflow are not allowed to occur. The speaker's
surmises are presented as alternative possibilities, and registering
22
E. de Selincourt a n d Helen Darbishire, eds., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5
vols. (Oxford, 1940-49), vol. 3, p. 77. This is the final version of the poem first published
in 1807. Unlike other poems by Wordsworth, " T h e Solitary R e a p e r " does not benefit
from the recent movement to reinstate the poet's first versions. Anyone w h o reads this
poem in the excellent volume in the "Oxford A u t h o r s " series - William Wordsworth, ed.
Stephen Gill (Oxford, 1984), p . 319 - will have some rude surprises in the second a n d
fourth stanzas.
23
Geoffrey H . H a r t m a n , Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New H a v e n , 1964), p p . 8 - 1 2 .
24
K r a m e r , Music and Poetry, p . 140.

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 72 Paul Alpers
alternatives is at the heart of the formal and representational
workings of both this and the second stanza. It is not simply the
statement of alternatives, but the way these stanzas balance their
surmises as equal possibilities. Both the rhyme scheme and the
short fourth line make for a clear division of the stanzas into halves,
and this effect is supported by the high degree of end-stopping in
the lines. Kramer's terms, blending and overflow, respond to
elements of the poem but are only partially appropriate to them.
The poem begins with this sense of musical experience - "O listen!
for the Vale profound/ Is overflowing with the sound" - but it
proceeds to bring music within the scope of language: precisely the
reverse of what happens in the poems with which Kramer associ-
ates it. The second stanza's social image of welcome notes and
bands of travellers suggests this accommodation to language,
which is sustained by the lineation of the verse. The lines do not
seem notably end-stopped, but as one moves through the stanza, it
would be possible to stop - not the stanza, of course, but the
particular sentence - after every line but the first. The effect of the
versification is to turn the initial overflowing of the reaper's song
into a well modulated "flow," the word used in the third stanza of
her "plaintive numbers" (a word which itself suggests ordered
utterance).
These counter-arguments to Kramer amount to saying that his
account of this poem does not fully answer to its character or our
experience of it. I think that the issues involved - not only here, but
in many such matters of practical criticism - are most coherently
and usefully stated in terms of mode. For what Kramer misconce-
ives, as it seems to me, is the way the usages and workings of "The
Solitary Reaper" manifest the way the poem conceives the human
singer's strength relative to world. He himself supplies the relevant
correction when he says, "One thing that is missing from Words-
worth's poem, however, is a recognition of the emotional and erotic
violence implicit in moments of overvocalizing."25 That is cer-
tainly so, and he then shows what he means in a passage from
Whitman, in which the first-person speaker takes into himself, both
submitting and containing, the voices and sounds of an entire
opera. Whitmanian verse, one imagines, would be the supreme
instrument of verbal overvocalizing. But the verse and structure of
"The Solitary Reaper" answer to a quite different conception of

25
Ibid., p. 141.

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 Lyrical modes 73
poetic powers, for the figure of the poet, far from being all-
inclusive, is divided between the reaper and the speaker. The
reaper has, and represents for the speaker, the capacity to be at
home in the world, even though alone. The first stanza emphasizes
her solitariness, and in the imagined scenes of the second stanza,
voices of nature relieve humans in desolate situations. Whatever its
theme, the reaper's song must be a ballad, the form of poetry that
most caught the Romantic imagination by its local and historical
rootedness and its nature as a communal expression. When the
speaker goes on to surmise its content, his imaginings bring out the
importance, to him, of this lone figure's being in touch with the
world of the past and the human world around her. Understood in
this way, the reaper can be seen to set the agenda of the poem,
which is to dispel solitude by utterance.
At the same time, there is no replicating the force and sig-
nificance of the reaper's song except through the speaker. In
Schiller's terms, this is a sentimental poem about a naive song. The
power of the reaper's song is unavailable to her as conciousness: she
is simply "reaping and singing by herself," as the poet says at the
beginning. Even the immediate power of her song, which is what
stops the poet dead - to adapt Hartman's connection of this poem
with epitaphs - is conveyed, in the second half of the first stanza, as
it impinges on the observer's mind and feelings. But the poem does
not simply accommodate unintelligible song to language and
consciousness; it maintains its double sense of the powers of human
utterance, by suggesting the difference the reaper's voice makes to
the poet's. The speaker seems most himself, and most in the
character of a poet, in the second stanza. Song is there felt to be a
power of nature to relieve an existential plight, and the stanza is
unique, in this poem, in capturing some of the magical intensity of
Romantic poetry.26 The third stanza can be thought to reduce this
imaginative scope and intensity, and at the same time to rescue the
speaker from depending on the remote and exotic, on the mere
symbolism of nature. It not only restores to the reaper her human
form, but has the effect of modifying the observer's utterance by
hers. For consider: would the reaper recognize the distinction the
speaker draws between the two kinds of song? Would she consider
the second kind of song "more humble" than an old ballad?
26
A. C. Bradley, the great Victorian critic, cited this stanza to show that Wordsworth was
not "deficient in romance": "the 'Arabian sands' had the same glamour for him as for
others." Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Bloomington, 1961), p. 114.

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 74 Paul Alpers
Presumably not — these are the speaker's distinctions and hierarch-
ies. But the important thing is that the poem itself, though appar-
ently unavoidably committed to making such distinctions, allows
the speaker, by the strength and felicity of his surmises, to mitigate
their force and approach the condition of the naive singer. The old
songs — far from being merely primitive or exotic, as "battles long
ago" may suggest — are assimilated to present utterance in the
second half of the stanza. For if we are still singing the old ballads,
it is because their "old, unhappy, far-off things" express "some
natural sorrow, loss, or pain/ That has been, and may be again."
And if these songs are being sung as one works, they are, in an
important sense, "familiar matter of to-day." This is not to say that
the reaper's song becomes the poet's, much less that it takes it over.
The mode of surmise remains too evident, indicating how deci-
sively the poet's power of representing another is determined by his
social, cultural, and physical situation. Hence, in the final stanza,
the moment of utter absorption — "I listened, motionless and still"
- gives way to the realities of time and physical motion, and the
poem, in which there has been not a word of mimetic sounding,
endows us with the only music of which it is capable, that which
sounds in the silence of the heart.

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