It gives to The Solitary Reaper its note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:
| Will no one tell me what she sings? |
Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives as Hartleap Well and Resolution and Independence would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple ‘moral.’
In Hartleap Well it is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.
| Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes; The horse and horseman are a happy pair; But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies, There is a doleful silence in the air. A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall, That as they galloped made the echoes roar; But horse and man are vanished, one and all; Such race, I think, was never seen before. |
At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.
| Where is the throng, the tumult of the race? The bugles that so joyfully were blown? —This chase it looks not like an earthly chase; Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone. |
Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd’s description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and his paramour. But now ‘the pleasure-house is dust,’ and the trees are grey, ‘with neither arms nor head’:
| Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade; The sun on drearier hollow never shone; So will it be, as I have often said, Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone. |
It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza: