Beauty in Simplicity

The sense of simplicity shared by the setting, the reaper, and her song in the poem suggests that beauty can be found in even the simplest of subjects.

One of the ways in which Wordsworth highlights simplicity in the poem is by focusing on the isolation of the reaper in the first stanza. For example, the first two lines of the text, “Behold her, single in the field,/yon solitary Highland Lass!” use two different words, out of the ten total words in the sentence, in order to emphasize the fact that the reaper stands alone in the Highlands (1-2). Two more times in this first stanza the speaker establishes the isolation of the subject, once in the third line, “reaping and singing by herself,” and again in the fifth line, “alone she cuts and binds the grain” (3, 5). This repetition of words such as...