After reading “To Sensibility” several times I have continuously come back to the same question. Who is the “she” the speaker is referring to throughout the poem? The only idea I have been able to decide upon includes that in the poem both the “I” and the “she” are Helen Maria Williams. I find this to be the case because the speaker, the “I”, knows such intimate details about the “she”. I understand that I am probably very incorrect in say this but when I read the poem from this point of view it comes to life for me. In the fifth stanza Williams writes that “She knows the price of ev’ry sigh, The Value of a tear (Williams 149).” While Williams has taken on a new perception of life in terms of “sensibility” and these statements could apply to that alone, I still find them to be deeply understood details about the “she” in the poem. Because the “she” in the poem thinks and perceives in terms of “sensibility” I believe this could further defend the idea that the “she” very well could be the “I”. Williams later wrote, regarding the “she”: her heart rises to joy, sinks to anguish, that her soul has grief that only she knows and that she is vainly secure in her mortality. These are profound understandings of a person’s emotions and thoughts. About line 57 Williams wrote “She oft will heave a secret sigh, Will shed a lonely tear…(Williams).” How could Williams have known what “she” did secretly or alone?
I actually think your way of reading it is fine, but perhaps not the most direct or simplest way. The title says the poem is addressed TO SENSIBILITY, a faculty of the human mind (and heart) that seems to be personified in the poem (as a kind of goddess). But the reason your way works OK is that of course the personified "deity" is really just an invention of Williams' and a projection of Williams' own experience and feelings.
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