weight

Concerning the problem of Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence and its subsequent exaggerated adaptation on his sister’s journals, I would call into question the concept of weightiness and how Wordsworth conveniently paints his character portrayals into something they’re not. In her rather quaint account of their mundane interaction with a Leech Gatherer (recorded Friday 3 October 1800 in The Grasmere Journals), Dorothy Wordsworth offers us the picture of a man who either by hard-luck or profession has descended into something what one might call near pathetic-ness. She says: “He lived by begging and was making his way to Carlisle where he should 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.” In her description she continues by drawing our attention to his injury “hurt in driving a cart”, which we deduce has only partly recovered.

In direct contrast to this is a man nearing the end, at the dusk of his own tremendous struggle as a kind of sage, seen in Resolution and Independence. Verse X highlights this man of pain and struggle whose “dire constraint of pain, or rage/Of sickness felt by him in times long past,/A more human weight upon his frame cast.” Yet later in Verse XII we also find in the same figure an almost supernatural capacity in communing with nature, who looks “upon the muddy water which he conned,/ As if he had been reading in a book:”. A man, not simply weighted by years of experience but somehow drawing forth a kind of wisdom from the analogs of pain and pleasure past. Wordsworth subtly revives in the figure of The Leech Gatherer sentiments first seen in Tintern Abbey.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth writes concerning his notion of sublimity that “To them I may have owed another gift, an aspect more sublime; that blessed mood . . .In which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible World is lighten’d:-- that serene and blessed mood.”

In conclusion I would mention that it is not necessarily Wordsworth’s purpose to lift the weight and heavy burden of mundane day-to-day human struggle (as depicted in his sister’s journal) in the hopes of a lighter more serene day. But instead, it should be noted that Wordsworth views the weight and painful struggles of human existence as profoundly interlocked with nature and natural occurrence, more formally seen both in The Thorn and The Ruined Cottage. His sentiments arising from Resolution and Independence are of the strong ties that bind man-to-man, his final semi-scornful laughter asking “God” to “be my help and stay secure; I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!” is prophetically calling to mind the solitude and similar weightiness he is to one day experience in his own age. Yet perhaps never nearly as weighty as that of the leech gatherer's.