Stanza 4 Summary

Lines 25-28

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;— 

• We've reached the poem's final stanza, and the speaker appears to not even care about understanding the woman's song anymore.
• The point is, this woman kept singing and singing and singing while she worked.
• She was singing, even while she was bending over ("o'er") her sickle (a special farming tool used to cut crops). 
• The "Maiden," as she is now called, sang and sang, as if her song would never end—kind of like this.
• The phrase "could have no ending" makes it sound like the song isn't designed to ever end, like some definitive song that is a fact of life.
• Now that we think about it, Wordsworth had described something kind of like this back in 1798 in a famous little poem you may have heard of called "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". In that most famous of Wordsworth poem, the speaker describes hearing the "still, sad music of humanity."
• It's possible Wordsworth is describing the "music of humanity" here as well.

Lines 29-32

I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

• With these final lines, the time has come for the speaker to be on his way (and for us to be on ours).
• Now that he's done telling us all about what the woman was doing while she was singing, and done trying to figure what she's singing about, he tells us what happened next.
• He stopped dead in his tracks, and stood "motionless and still" as he listened.
• After that, he went on his way, but he's apparently kept the woman's song ("the music") in his heart ever since—"long after it was heard no more."
• It seems our speaker was quite moved. In fact, maybe he was a little too moved. That "motionless and still" is just a tad bit… eerie for our liking.
• That's because, while normally there would be nothing wrong with those words, Wordsworth usually uses them in very—how shall we say this—unsettling contexts.
• Exhibit A: "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"—in that poem, Wordsworth says of a dead girl, "No motion has she now." Exhibit B: in Book V of the Prelude, right before the dead body of a drowned man is hoisted from the water, the speaker describes a "breathless stillness." Exhibit C: in Book IV of that same poem, Wordsworth describes a creepy, ghastly, former soldier and— do we need to go on?
• The bottom line: "motionless and still" is an unsettling combo in Wordsworth's poetry. 
• Okay, so then what's the deal? The speaker finds this woman, she sings a great song, he's totally moved by it—why all the doom and gloom?
• Well, one way to look at it is that it is kind of an eerie little scene, even a bit creepy. The speaker is almost spying on this woman.
• In addition, the speaker is so immersed in the scene before him—so "into" it—that he might as well be dead. It's a lot like when you get totally engrossed in something and you're pretty much dead to the world.
• Now, while this is all sounds very ominous, it's also kind of good in a weird way. The Romantic poets loved to talk about something called "transcendence," about stepping outside the self and accessing a higher spiritual reality. In order for that to happen, though, you sort of have to "die" for a little while—fly away, that is.
• That's kind of what is happening here. The speaker is experiencing a transcendental moment: he is "motionless and still" because he has stepped away from himself (think daydreaming).
• Now all of this is complicated by the weird tense changes in this poem. 
• You may recall that, up to now, the speaker has been speaking in the present tense: "behold," "sings," etc.
• Now, all of a sudden, he's talking in the past tense: "I listened," "I mounted."
• This shift from the immediacy of the present ("Hey, look, there she is, she's singing") to the distance of the past ("I listened and then went away") relates to this whole issue of transcendence.
• Think of it like this: if at first (in the present tense parts of the poem) the speaker is totally immersed in the scene before him, by the end you could say that he is less immersed.
• At the poem's conclusion, he is looking back on the scene, rather than presenting it as it unfolds.
• In a way, then, he has reentered the stream of time. The day dream is now over, and he is moving forward with his life—"mounting" the hill and continuing on his journey.