"As high as we have mounted in delight/In our dejection do we sink as low": Sensibility, Polarity and Romantic Flux in William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence"
Abstract
My paper broaches shifts in sensibility, to examine Romanticism's ambivalent relationship with reason and the imagination, with specific reference to William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence". Originally titled "The Leech Gatherer" (1802), the poem confronts the romantic anxiety of Nature's overwhelming dynamism and its unavoidable influence.
In this way, the poem functions as an origin narrative for Wordsworth's 'organic sensibility' and can be seen to connect the logic of sense conditions with the imagination. By doing so, the poem gives way to the operative mode of flux.
Romantic flux concerns the relationship between subject-object, that of perspective and response, and comes to share aspects of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's understanding of the 'law of polarity'. The poem tracks the subject's observation of the synchronicity of flux and the possibility of participatory harmony with its object.
Read this way, Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" broaches Romanticism's inherent ambivalence towards sensibility- it being both sensory response and experience of that sensory response- so to negotiate the challenges of Romanticism's preference for personhood above set structures of knowing and the necessity for moral discernment in the world and self.