As the poet walks in the Scottish highlands, he hears a woman, a solitary reaper, singing. She sings a sad song, a "melancholy strain," and it fills the "vale" where she "cuts and binds the grain."
The song touches the poet's soul. He cannot make out the words, but the sounds hold him as he listens. He writes:
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
He wonders what she sings. Is...
As the poet walks in the Scottish highlands, he hears a woman, a solitary reaper, singing. She sings a sad song, a "melancholy strain," and it fills the "vale" where she "cuts and binds the grain."
The song touches the poet's soul. He cannot make out the words, but the sounds hold him as he listens. He writes:
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
He wonders what she sings. Is it an old battle song? A more humble song about ordinary losses? He doesn't know, but the words don't really matter. It's the lovely, sad sound that fills the air, as if she is a natural creature, and the motion of her bending over her sickle, that stops the poet in his tracks. He says, "I listened motionless and still."
Listening to this song becomes a transcendent experience for the poet, for the song stays with him. Although a simple, ordinary moment--a woman singing as she works--it had a "profound" quality to the poet that will not be soon forgotten. Little things in life, the poet says, can stick with us:
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
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