This article investigates how Matthew Arnold’s early poem “Resignation” investigates the speaker’s perceptions of the power of unanticipated adversity, irresistible undertaking, and a vigorous pursuit of human resolution. Reworking an ode form into his work, devoted to his sister suffering from her precipitous affliction, Arnold ponders over the problem of man’s adverse fortune, his graceful-mindedness to forbear such occurrences, and to simultaneously pursue an unswerving power inherent within his willpower. Among his initial poems, this poem is remarkable in foreshadowing one of the writer’s recurrent thematic concerns with the dilemma of human choice under the ineluctable force of its bizarre and repugnant counterpart. In reference to his various poems and prose works, “Resignation” certainly establishes the germ of the territory of one’s resilient and free choice, which leads to his later portrayal of Empedocles’s defiant spirit, whose characterization has been regarded as one of Arnold’s great literary distinctions. Arnold’s poetic purpose is not to reveal the characters’ resigned stance, but discover an Empedocles-like dynamic and vibrant spirit of man in response to the present predicament.