Poet’s Corner: Wordsworth–Resolution 2

21 February 2026

(20 June 2014) We return with the next section of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”:

VI
My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life’s business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?
VII
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;
Of Him who walked in glory and in joy
Following his plough, along the mountain-side:
By our own spirits are we deified:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
VIII
Now, whether it were by peculiar grace,
A leading from above, a something given,
Yet it befell, that, in this lonely place,
When I with these untoward thoughts had striven,
Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven
I saw a Man before me unawares:
The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.
IX
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense:
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;
X
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 life’s 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.

The poet, having previously remarked on nature’s beauty, and its calming influence, and admitting that he has manic mood swings, now reminds himself that he, who spends his life so pleasantly composing poetry, taking no thought for anything but the verses, should not expect anyone else to take care of his needs. He reminds himself of another poet prodigy–Chatterton–who had great potential, but succumbed to a manic mood swing and took his own life, one danger of this profession. At this point he sees an old man, older than any he has before seen, an old man who looks as solid and stalwart as a stone high on a mountain top, where all who look can see him, and see that he has weathered many of life’s worst storms (unlike Chatterton!). The old man is so bent with age, that the poet wonders if he carries some inhuman weight upon his shoulders, whether from care or disease. In this moment, when the poet has sunk to a new low, remembering Chatterton, who gave up and gave in, there is an old man still going about his duties, in spite of everything! We will learn more of this old man–the ‘leech gatherer’–when we return on Tuesday with another edition of the Poet’s Corner! Good reading!