Reading William Wordsworth’s
“Resolution and Independence”
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
John Constable, Dedham Vale: Evening (1802)
Date of Recounted Experience:
26 September, 1800
Dates of Composition:
3 May – 4 July, 1802
Date of Publication:
1807
Latin:
But later on my Muse shall speak to
thee in a weightier tone, when the
times afford me undisturbed rewards.
Virgil, “The Gnat”
Brief Background
The events in the poem refer to a walk the
Wordsworths took through the Lake District
probably on 26 September, 1800. In a note to
Isabella Fenwick Wordsworth recalls: “This old
man I met a few hundred yards from my cottage at
Town End, Grasmere, and the account of him is
taken from his own mouth.” The poem was known
in the Wordsworth household as “The LeechGatherer,” though it never received that name in
print.
The Many Ways to Read a Poem
Before you learn how to write about this or any
poem, consider that there are a variety of different
methods for reading poetry. You are free to use one
method or another, or to combine two or more
methods (essay space pending). As a general rule,
you can examine a poem without context or with
context. Usually it is best to defer research into
context until you have a strong sense of the poem
on its own.
Approach I
Close Reading without Context
Such seemed this man, not all alive nor dead,
Nor all asleep, in his extreme old age.
His body was bent double, feet and head
Coming together in their pilgrimage,
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.
Himself he propped, his body, limbs, and face,
Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood;
And still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish flood,
Motionless as a cloud the old man stood
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether, if it move at all.
75
80
Approach II
Close Reading with Context
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals. Friday,
3 October, 1800.
[W]e met an old man almost double. He had on a coat thrown over
his shoulders above his waistcoat and coat. Under this he carried a
bundle and had an apron on and a nightcap. His face was interesting.
He had dark eyes and a long nose….He was of Scotch parents but
had been born in the army. He had had a wife, ‘and a good woman,
and it pleased God to bless us with ten children’; all these were dead
but one of whom he had not heard [from] for many years, a sailor.
His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had
not strength for it. He lived by begging and was making his way to
Carlisle where he would buy a few godly books to sell. He said leeches
were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they
have been scarce. He supposed it owing to their being much soughtafter, that they did not breed fast, and were of slow growth….He had
been hurt in driving a cart: his leg broke, his body driven over, his
skull fractured.
Ways of Seeing
his voice to me was like a stream (l. 114)
the man did seem/ Like one whom I had met
with in a dream (ll. 116-17)
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace/
About the weary moors continually,/ Wandering
about alone and silently (ll. 136-17)
Wordsworth, Preface to Poems (1815)
Motionless as a cloud the old man stood
That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether, if it move at all.
The imagination is not a mere storehouse mental copies
of real-life objects. It “denot[es] operations of the mind
upon…objects, and processes of creation or of
composition governed by certain fixed laws.” In this
poem the cloud “is endowed with something of the
power of life to approximate it to” the old man, and the
old man is “stripped of some of [his] vital qualities to
assimilate [him] to” the cloud, so that “the two objects
unite and coalesce in just comparison.”
“Observations on the Diseases in November,” Universal
Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure 107 (Dec. 1800), 107.
George Havell, “Leech Finders,” in Costumes of
Yorkshire (1814)