William Wordsworth

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803

Romanticizing Urban Landscape

Wordsworth unexpectedly praises London as beautiful, challenging Romantic poetry's typical nature worship.

Earth has not any thing to shew more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in it's majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

Architectural Metaphor

City described as wearing morning like a garment—personification that transforms urban space into living entity.

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Silent Urban Morning

Catalog of urban structures presented without human activity, creating an almost supernatural stillness.

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 splendor 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;

Sleeping Metropolis

London personified as a living being momentarily at rest, with 'mighty heart' suggesting urban energy temporarily suspended.

And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Romantic Vision of London

Wordsworth's sonnet radically reimagines the city as a sublime landscape, challenging contemporary views of industrial urban spaces as ugly or chaotic.

Written during the early Industrial Revolution, the poem finds transcendent beauty in London's morning stillness. By presenting the city as a natural, almost organic entity, Wordsworth transforms industrial architecture into a poetic vision.

Technical Mastery of the Sonnet

The poem employs a Petrarchan sonnet structure, with eight lines of description followed by six lines of emotional response. Wordsworth uses personification and sensory language to animate the cityscape, making London feel both monumental and intimate.

Notice the deliberate lack of human figures, which creates a sense of suspended animation and allows the city itself to become the poem's living subject.