Resolution and Independence is about a poet’s swing from morning joy to fear of future misery—and the steadying encounter with an old leech-gatherer whose perseverance restores courage. The poem is on Poetry Catalog: Resolution and Independence.
After a night of roaring wind and rain in floods, morning rises calm and bright. Birds sing in distant woods; the hare races on the moors and raises a glittering mist with her feet. The traveler-speaker feels as happy as a boy, old remembrances gone, far from the vain melancholy ways of men. Then, as it sometimes chances, from the might of joys that can climb no higher, dejection sinks as low as delight had mounted. Fears and fancies come; dim sadness and blind thoughts he cannot name.
Despondency and the poet’s fear
He bethinks himself that another day may bring solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty. He has lived as if life’s business were a summer mood, as if needful things would come unsought. How can he expect that others should build and sow for him who takes no heed for himself? Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, and the ploughman-poet who walked in glory haunt him. Poets in youth begin in gladness; thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
The poem is about vocation under threat: what happens when imaginative joy cannot guarantee a life? Nature’s bright morning cannot by itself cure that fear. Into this mental weather steps a figure who will.
The leech-gatherer
Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven he sees a man unawares—the oldest who ever wore grey hairs. Similes of huge stone on an eminence and sea-beast on a shelf make him almost geological. Not all alive nor dead, bent double, propped on a long grey staff, he stands motionless as a cloud. He stirs the muddy water as if reading a book. His speech is feeble yet solemn, choice word and measured phrase, like grave religious livers in Scotland.
He has come to gather leeches, old and poor; employment hazardous and wearisome; from pond to pond, moor to moor, gaining honest maintenance. While he talks, his voice becomes to the speaker like a stream scarce heard, and the man like one met in a dream—or sent from a far region to give human strength by apt admonishment.
God, said I, be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!
What resolution means here
Former thoughts return—the fear that kills, hope unwilling to be fed, cold, pain, labour, mighty poets dead—until the speaker renews his question and hears again of dwindled leeches and perseverance. He could have laughed himself to scorn to find in that decrepit man so firm a mind. What the poem is about, then, is not leech-gathering as trivia, but the moral spectacle of resolution: dignity without glamour, independence without isolation’s despair.
The title names virtues the speaker lacks and then borrows. That borrowing—thinking of the leech-gatherer in future need—is the poem’s practical aboutness: memory of steadfastness as portable strength. On Poetry Catalog, give the long stanzaic poem time. Watch the weather of feeling change. Joy, dread, encounter, and vow form the arc.
Joy’s neighbor is dread
Few Wordsworth poems map mood-swing so explicitly. The stock-dove, jay, magpie, and glittering hare build a world that loves the sun; within stanzas, the same speaker rehearses poverty and madness. Aboutness includes that proximity. Resolution is needed precisely because delight and dejection travel together in a sensitive mind—especially a poet’s.
The leech-gatherer’s repetition matters. He says his piece more than once; the speaker must hear perseverance twice before it sticks. Admonishment arrives not as abstract advice but as a body bent double that still travels moor to moor. Independence here is not proud isolation; it is continued work without guarantee of ease.
When you finish the poem on Poetry Catalog, test its closing vow. What human example would you think of on your own lonely moor? The poem is about finding such an emblem and keeping it ready. Resolution becomes a remembered face and a remembered sentence about dwindled leeches and not giving up.
That is a practical aboutness worthy of the title: not heroics, but the decision to borrow steadiness from someone who already practiced it under harder weather.
Read: Resolution and Independence by William Wordsworth. Return to the closing vow when your own mornings turn suddenly heavy.