Monthly Archives: January 2019

A Short Analysis of William Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’

“The Solitary Reaper” is my favourite Wordsworth poem.

InterestingLiterature's avatarInteresting Literature

‘The Solitary Reaper’ is one of Wordsworth’s best-known poems. Although it’s a ballad, it didn’t appear in Wordsworth’s most famous collection, Lyrical Ballads, because he wrote it after the publication of that volume (co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in 1798. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ appeared in Wordsworth’s 1807 collection Poems in Two Volumes. The poem has received a fair bit of critical analysis; here, we offer some notes towards a commentary on it.

The Solitary Reaper

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;

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If hyperbolic metaphors were true…

This post manages to be both amusing and informative at the same time.

Matthew Wright's avatarMatthew Wright

Today I thought I’d examine a couple of hyperbolic metaphors on the basis of their being literally true and see where that got me, scientifically. I mean, what is a hyperbolic metaphor worth if science can’t say something about it, really? Check this out.

‘Enough food to sink a battleship’

How much food would sink a battleship? We have to suppose it
means enough food to overload the vessel until it sinks, but that doesn’t
define a figure because battleships have been built to all sorts of displacements, from
the 10,000-ton British jobs of the late nineteenth century through to the
70,000-ton Japanese monsters of the Second World War. Obviously the weight
needed to sink one will vary.

HMS Camperdown, a British battleship of about 10,000 tons launched in 1885. Picture via Shipbucket, by DarthPanda, CC Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 license.

What’s less obvious is that even if we defined a

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I Know A Young Lady Named White

I know a young lady named White

Who only comes out late at night.

She dislikes garlic and steak

But loves to partake

Of necks as the clock strikes midnight!

Monday Humour

When a man whose name is Ted
Found a young lady under his bed
He said, with a sigh
“I don’t know why
My wife, she sleeps under our bed”!

When a sailor whose name is Mark
Said, “this world is bleak and dark”,
His second cousin Jim
Jumped in to swim
And was eaten by a shark!