Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

 

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still! 

 

Summary:

 

An experience of a sunrise (witnessed upon the Westminster Bridge) that occurred way back in July 31, 1802 ultimately found expression through poetical outburst in this Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter of ten syllables a line.  The theme of the poem originated When Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were travelling to Calais to visit Annette Vallon and his daughter Caroline by Annette, prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.

   Customary to his inimitable style and in spirit essentially romantic, Wordsworth begins with a hyperbole ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair ‘, to lay bare the intense feelings that he experienced and wanted to immortalise.  

The octet / octave running through the first eight lines is composed of a single sentence and specifically establishes the scene, i.e. the physical layout of London, against the backdrop of which he deplores a man being without a soul, should he fail to appreciate the ethereal beauty that clothed the city with its manmade structures. The poet is overwhelmed at the rare, wonderful sight in which the city, though defaced by the colossal and invasive structures of man and essentially antagonistic to each other, seems to have taken everything into a mystical glory, as if everything were a part of it, standing in perfect harmony, breathing life to the very essence of what London has always meant to the poet.

The poet is overwhelmed with joy as he finds ‘his’ London free from the exploits and mindlessness of industrial revolution belching smoke incessantly and smudging the true serenity he has been so fond of and familiar with. Today he finds London pure, bare and silent awash in the grandeur of morning sun. It is a scene that no longer exists but in the minds of artists and painters.

The sestet too begins with a hyperbole ‘Never…’ and is replete with exclamations but dramatically sets the tone into a much faster and livelier outpouring of thoughts as against the slow description in the octave. By way of first person narrative and making his own persona a direct element of the poem, Wordsworth skilfully employs personification of the sun and the river, etc to focus the ethereal ambience of the morning and the slow perpetual existence of life, of which he is also a part. He felt the tranquillity prevailing about the city with its silence against the slow drift of the river as the true rudiments of human life, so much that he thanks God that the mechanised heart of the city, even for a day, is asleep and he is grateful to witness what has become so uncommon if not non-existent.