1802 This is the date the poet assigns to an inspired Petrarchan sonnet bearing what may be the least inspired title in English literature: ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’. The two quatrains go like this:
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.
What was Wordsworth, so famously associated with the wild landscapes of the Lake District, doing in London? Accompanied by his sister Dorothy, he was on his way to France, there to meet his former French mistress Annette Vallon, to try to agree an arrangement for her support and that of their illegitimate daughter Caroline. They crossed the Thames by Westminster Bridge because it offered the most direct route south, without their having to thread their way through the crowded City to reach London Bridge.
But they crossed on 31 July. It was on this date that the poem was at least begun. It was the date of their return crossing that Wordsworth chose to affix to the poem’s title.
Either way, what would they have seen? Obviously not the present Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry’s neo-gothic monstrosity not substantially complete until the 1860s, but Westminster Abbey and the lower-level buildings associated with it, like St Stephen’s Chapel, where the House of Commons sat. Dorothy’s diary mentions St Paul’s, which would have loomed over the City to the right of their view.
The poem itself refers to ‘Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples … / Open unto the fields, and to the sky’, which brings two further points of difference between their time and ours: lots of shipping in the Thames, including smaller sailing ships and barges servicing the larger vessels, and a much lower density of building to the west of the City, allowing fields and gardens between the houses.
Was it this Canaletto-like vision that melted Wordsworth’s hardness of heart towards the great wen? Because he wasn’t above using the capital city as an emblem for all that had gone wrong with the country, as the title of another of his famous Petrarchan sonnets written that year makes clear:
‘London, 1802’
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, …
The answer, as so often, lies within the poem itself. In the first place, the first line of ‘Westminster Bridge’ is oddly phrased. Alright, so he needs ‘not anything’ (as opposed to nothing) to fill out the iambic line, but what lies behind that curiously negative construction, as though disputing many ‘fairer’ sights commonly claimed? And why ‘Earth’ and not ‘the earth’? Is the planet being personified? If so, to what purpose? And ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty’? Is the nature poet reproving himself for taking too little notice of the city’s beauty?
Maybe, but it’s worth noticing that he has to de-citify London in order to like it. First, there are no people here – no stinking crowds throwing their sweaty nightcaps in the air to greet the morning. Second, there is no smoke. It’s the early morning, you see, so for once ‘The Smoke’ isn’t smoky. Third (those negatives just go on and on), the usual noise and clutter of the big city is absent; the scene is ‘silent, bare’.
Wordsworth’s most triumphant negative amounts to an admission, almost a rebuke to himself. He has gained from this scene an emotion to match his more usual landscapes:
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
But to gain the revelation he has, in a sense, to kill London off:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Still hearts don’t beat, don’t sustain life.