Unlike William Blake’s ‘London’ , ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge‘ was not a critique
William Wordsworth
of the social values of the times in which he lived. Wordsworth was certainly capable of that; in the same year (1802) in which he wrote ‘Composed….’, he wrote ‘London’ – a critique of the English people and their apparent selfish and tired nature.
Born in 1770, Wordworth was a Romantic and possibly the most famous one. Poets of the Romantic Movement looked to nature for inspiration and viewed the natural world as the epitome of civilisation. Wordworth was educated in the north of England and introduced to poetry by his father. Perhaps the beauty of the country side in which he grew up inspired his leadership of the Romantic Movement. Wordsworth attended St. John’s College, Cambridge and after graduation in 1891 he began to spend time in Europe, fathering a child by the Frenchwoman Annette Vallon, before the hostile relationship between France and England forced him back across the channel.
The Treaty of Amiens which was signed between France and England in 1802 meant that Wordsworth could now travel back to France to see his daughter and her mother. It was at the beginning of this journey, undertaken with his sister Dorothy, that the carriage in which they were traveling halted on Westminster Bridge. Wordsworth, generally unimpressed by the city in which he lived, saw it in a different light (literally) as the sun was rising and penned the following sonnet:
‘ Earth hath 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 sleep
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!’