despondency and madness

The narrator reminisces about living for the moment and “from all care,” without thinking about consequences or about anything at all: “My old remembrances went from me wholly,/And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.” He would do what he wanted to do and “take no heed at all,” forgetting that one day he will not be able to be independent, and he would need “others” to “build for him, sow for him and at his call love him.” So, when a poet does reach the point where his mind “can no further go,” the result is immense frustration: “despondency and madness.” Unlike the negative example in The Ruined Cottage (the somberness of Margaret’s story makes the narrator’s life seem relatively bearable), the leech-gatherer provides a positive example. Though the narrator passes him off as a useless old man, as Wordsworth fears his readers may do to him, the leech-gatherer proves that his boring life is worth while because it has resulted in “so firm a mind.” Hence, the poet can feel confident in his own existence.

The specific emphasis on poetry and aging poets makes it easy to pin the narrator as Wordsworth. And while the final message is that the older the poet, the more wisdom he has to impart, Resolution and Independence unintentionally reveals Wordsworth’s insecurities. He copies the structure of his less personal poem, The Ruined Cottage: a youthfully described nature scene which segues into a saddening story and results in his realization of the benefits of maturity. However, just because one old man is wise, it does not mean that all minds grow firmer with age. Wordsworth manipulates his readers by using his own life as example of how they should live. Maybe he’s not so convinced that old age is better than youth after all.