Traveller

In her Friday 3 October 1800 entry into The Grasmere Journals, Dorothy described the man on the moor as an “old man…his face was interesting…his trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had not the strength for it.” Clearly, although Dorothy was undoubtedly in her brother’s company when he encountered the man that he based Resolution and Independence on, he chose to exclude her from the poem, similar to his exclusion of her in his poem Daffodils. Perhaps he wanted his narrator to be focused solely upon Nature and the old man, rather than a superfluous and distracting conversation with Dorothy. Or perhaps, Wordsworth wanted to create a solitary, if not isolated, narrator who was more available and dependent upon the old man and his tragic story for human contact..

Wordsworth portrays his narrator as a lone wanderer upon the moor – reminiscent of his theme of wandering and detachment that dominated his poem The Ruined Cottage. In The Ruined Cottage, on one hand, the primary narrator stumbles upon a fellow wanderer – a “strange and almost terrifying character” – who tells him a tragic story. On the other hand, the narrator of Resolution and Independence stumbles upon an old man whom, seemingly, is a tragic story in and of himself. Interestingly, the old man appears strikingly similar to the Ancient Mariner from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as he is an old mysterious man who has a lengthy and mysterious past. This narrator, similar to the narrator of Tintern Abbey, appears interested if not disturbed by the “still sad music of humanity.”

Moreover, by excluding Dorothy from this poem, Wordsworth creates a more intimate interaction between the narrator and the old man – and moreover – creates a sort of parallel between the two. Both men, during their solitary wanderings, are pilfering from Nature – in a sense, the narrator is taking sublime, sensory satisfaction from nature, while the old man is taking leeches to most likely sell for medicinal purposes. However, while the old man is taking out of necessity (so that he can subsist on this meager income), the reader is led to question: is the narrator taking sensory satisfaction from Nature out of necessity?

Even if one argues that ‘yes,’ he is acting out of necessity, one almost undoubtedly sees through the narrator’s superficial actions (in comparison to the old man). The narrator appears to be gathering superficial joy merely from the picturesque (not the sublime). Moreover, Wordsworth makes no effort to humanize him in the end of the poem, as he did in Tintern Abbey by conveying a seemingly moral message to his younger and less experienced sister, Dorothy. Perhaps Wordsworth should have included her in Resolution and Independence as a means to humanize this particular narrator, rather than leaving him in a somewhat superficial and isolated state of sorrow for the old man.