Romantic Lyrics in Landscape: Constable and Wordsworth

Abstract

C ONSTABLE'S painting Gleaners, Brighton and Wordsworth's poem The Solitary Reaper illustrate both artists' practice of choosing simple, basic aspects of human experience and nature's familiar views as subjects for their art. For both Constable and Wordsworth meaning resides in and can be revealed in the most ordinary scenes. Constable's harvest scene shows an enduring and recurrent, in a sense timeless, human occupation. Two women stand and bend, sun-scorched and wind-blown, in the stubble of a wheatfield, gathering the last of the harvest. They exemplify the ongoing, common human experience of work, as they toil to take sustenance from the earth. They participate in the basic rhythm of sowing and harvest that uses, as it harmonizes with, the cycles of the natural world. painting is a simple image of the natural-human life at its foundations, responsive to the seasons and the changes of the land. Wordsworth's poem, too, is a simple icon. Its scene shows a girl who sings as she works alone in a field, cutting and binding grain. Her work is the same common labor that Constable's gleaners engage in. Her song flows from the natural human impulse to sing to the rhythm of work. Although the poet refuses to define and delimit the nature of her song, suggesting that it might deal with heroic events far away and long ago, he says still that it may also as well be a more humble lay that treats of the Familiar matter of to-day.' basic patterns of human experience are common. If her song deals with grief, grief is natural. Perhaps she