William Wordsworth 7 April 1770 Wordsworth House, Cockermouth, England 23 April 1850 (aged 80) Cumberland, England Poet Poetry Romanticism Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion

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Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon (NPG).

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge AnalysisEarth 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 the 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! (William Wordsworth)

ANALYSIS OF THE POETRY

A. About William Wordsworth (The Author of Composed Upon Westminster Bridge) William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge." Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Early Life of William Wordsworth The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberlandpart of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, Earl of Abergavenny was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant with him until his death in 1783. Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, did teach him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father's

library. Along with spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his mother's parents house in Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide. After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

William Wordsworth Marriage and Children In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year. The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette, but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life.

In 1802, he visited Calais with his sister Dorothy and met Annette and his daughter Caroline. The purpose of the visit was to pave the way for his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Afterwards he wrote the poem "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the conception of this poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occurring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s. With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's obligations. In 1802, after Wordsworth's return from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the 4,000 debt owed to Wordsworth's father incurred through Lowther's failure to pay his aide. Later that year, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased William and Mary: John Wordsworth (18 June 18031875). Married four times: 1. Isabella Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward. 2. Helen Ross (d. 1854). No issue. 3. Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b.1858). 4. Mary Gamble. No issue. Dora Wordsworth (16 August 1804 9 July 1847). Married Edward Quillinan Thomas Wordsworth (15 June 1806 1 December 1812).

Catherine Wordsworth (6 September 1808 4 June 1812). William "Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 18101883). Married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, Gordon.

First Publication and Lyrical Ballads In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental." The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of 900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was augmented significantly in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.

Death William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850,

and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognized as his masterpiece.

B. Setting, Themes, Language and Imagery of the Poetry The setting is London as seen from Westminster Bridge, which connects the south bank of the Thames River with Westminster on the north bank. Westminster, called an inner borough, is now part of London. The dominating theme in the poem is Nature. London is not introduced in its

negative aspect, but it is inserted in natural scenery. The author describes the beauty of the city as the towers, the cathedrals, the theatres and the temples. Wordsworth personifies the city along with the earth and the sun. This reiterates his conviction that the city, at this particular point of day, does not clash with nature but becomes a part of it. In Wordsworth's view, the air is clean and only the light of the sun illuminates the city. The poet transmits to the readers the calm and the tranquility described in his poem. There are neither sounds or noises, there is only silence. In Blake's poem, hearing is the prevailing sense. In Wordsworth's one, it is the sight that emerges, while the hearing is absent. On the one hand in Blake's composition, the town is presented through the smoke that pervades the walls of the Churches. On the other hand, in Wordsworth's poem, London shows clean air and the sun illuminates the whole city. In this poem, Wordsworth brings the scenery around him to life (an example of the Pathetic fallacy). Wordsworth personifies the Earth by giving it a capital letter, and describing it as having the ability to "show". He also personifies the city, by describing it as wearing the morning beauty "like a garment". The image of the sun is powerful, as it is referred to as "he", with actions described by diction such as "steep". This diction creates the image of sunlight slowly submerging into the Earth's splits. The river is personified when it is described as having its "own sweet will", and the houses are personified by their description of being asleep. Lastly, the city itself is personified with the line "and all that mighty heart is lying still". These personifications again help us to draw the conclusion that Wordsworth is considering a sleeping city as part of nature. The compact description of London in lines six and seven emphasize the compactness of the city, and long vowel sounds such as "glideth" and "silent" emphasize the calm feeling of the occasion. The description "bright and glittering in the smokeless air" creates a distinct image of the clarity of the morning. These images combine to create a breathtaking image of the morning. Despite this excitement created by the vivid descriptions, prevalent in this poem is a sense of calmness. The poem describes "a calm so deep" that "even the houses seem asleep". The poem depicts a vivid scene that is yet another fond memory shared between

Wordsworth and his sister. He uses beautiful language and clever literary devices, especially imagery, to make the city come alive before the reader's eyes. The passionate picture that the poem paints is a memory that calms and placates. The spondaic substitution or successive accented syllables lends emphasis to the emotional feeling that strikes the poet. Here is a romantic who spends most of his time in the Lake District, in fields of daffodils, exulting in an urban morning cityscape, unconcerned with the getting and spending, buying and lending that he decries elsewhere. The poem, written in the Petrarchan sonnet form, describes the beauty of London in the early morning just when the sun rises. We perceive the beauty of the city not so much through the description of what can be seen as through a sense of the admiration of the speaker. It is as if he is looking at a wonder, at something that cannot be but is still there. This sense of admiration is communicated through the development of a strange paradox, which states the impossible unity of two contradictory things: the industrial city and the organic beauty of nature (cf. Cleanth Brooks' analysis of this poem in his essay "The Language of Paradox"). This paradox is introduced through the image of dress, which the rhymes of the octave highlight: the city is fair (beautiful) because it wears "like a garment" the natural beauty of the morning; but wearing the beauty of the morning in fact means that the city is bare (naked): what it wears is just "the smokeless air". The paradox is carried over and developed further in the sestet. The connection with the dress metaphor is established through the image of the city being steeped in the light of the sun and then the paradox is extended to the strange union of being dead (or asleep) and being alive. The city is now more beautiful and more alive than nature itself, but this is only so because it is steeped in the light of the sun and is thus deep asleep. The rhyming words steep deep asleep highlight these connections. As opposed to the city, which is "lying still", the natural parts of the landscape, the sunlight, the "valley, rock, or hill" as well as the river are now active, they dominate over the sleeping city, as is emphasized by the rhyming words hill at their will lying still. The city, represented in the last line by the metaphor of the heart, is thus alive because it is dead, because it is inactive and is dominated by its natural environment.

The thematic development of the poem is seconded by the rhythms. The enjambments (and the eye rhyme) in the octave express the boundless admiration for this beautiful sight, the overflowing emotion of the speaker. This is further emphasized by the fact that although the lines of the Petrarchan sonnet in English should be iambic pentameters, none of these lines are exactly iambic. Even where the rhythm gets very close to this (lines 3, 4, 5, and 12); the sentence structure or a caesura disrupts the smooth iambic rhythm. This is true of all the lines except the very last one where the rhythms smoothes out and a perfect iambic pentameter ends the poem: "And all that mighty heart is lying still!" One function of this metrical development is clearly to mark the end of the poem. Apart from this, however, the clear iambic rhythm also functions here on another level. By the sound effect it creates it contradicts the explicit verbal meaning of the line in which it appears. While the line says that the "mighty heart" of the city "is lying still", the iambic rhythm gives us a strong sense of the beating of a heart. Thus the paradox that is developed all through the poem reaches its final statement in this line. The city now is "lying still", it is dead, it is not itself, it is dominated by its natural environment; and it is precisely because of this that it can come to life: the mighty heart begins to beat only when it is lying still.

Inspiration .......Wordsworth's inspiration for the poem was the view he beheld from Westminster Bridge on the morning of July 31, 1802, when most of the residents were still in bed and the factories had not yet stoked their fires and polluted the air with smoke. He and his sister, Dorothy, were crossing the bridge in a coach taking them to a boat for a trip across the English Channel to France. In her diary, Dorothy wrote: We mounted the Dover Coach at Charing Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St. Paul's, with the River and a Multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight.... The houses were not overhung with their cloud of

smoke and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such pure light that there was even something like a purity of Nature's own grand spectacles.

Rhyme Scheme and Meter The rhyme scheme of "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" and other Petrarchan sonnets is as follows: (1) first stanza (octave): abba, abba; (2) second stanza (sestet): cd, cd, cd (or another combination, such as cde, cde; cdc, cdc; or cde, dce. The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, with ten syllables (five iambic feet) per line. (An iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.) The first two lines of the poem demonstrate the metric pattern: .......1...... ........1....... . ..2......... ....3................4..................5 . ..2......... ....3.................4.................5

Earth HAS..|..not AN..|..y THING..|..to SHOW..|..more FAIR: Dull WOULD..|..he BE..|..of SOUL | who COULD..|..pass BY a...Earth has not anything to show more fair: b...Dull would he be of soul who could pass by b...A sight so touching in its majesty: a...This City now doth like a garment wear a...The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, b...Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie b...Open unto the fields, and to the sky, a...All bright and glittering in the smokeless air c...Never did sun more beautifully steep d...In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; c...Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! d...The river glideth at his own sweet will: c...Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; 8

d...And all that mighty heart is lying still!

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C. Images of Composed Upon Westminster Bridge In this poem the speaker stands upon Westminster Bridge and describes the view he sees with a sense of amazement and admiration. It is morning when there is nobody on the streets and the factories have not started working yet. From the description later on we can see that he talks about London in the eighteenth-nineteenth century not about the one we know now. This made him able to demonstrate how nature and man lived together at that time since London was open unto the fields and was not so expanded as it is today. The poet enjoys standing on the bridge (which is a symbol of connection which supports the idea of unity between nature and man) and makes his amazement felt with plenty of devices.

In the poem Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth, the speaker, tells us in simple, beautiful language about his view of the city. Wordsworths imagery presents a mood of calmness and tranquillity. He personifies the world around him by saying such things as The river has a will and the city wears clothes. The first line of the poem says that the Earth has something to show us. Like a child with a new toy the Earth wants to show us something neat. This image suggests that the world is alive and beautiful. The object the earth has to show is magnificent and if you dont like this calm city then youre dull according to the speaker. The image of the garment shows us that the city is alive and has changing moods or has phases of beauty. At the time the poem was written the city was calm. The city was wearing a silent garment. According to the speaker the ships and towers lie there and even the houses seem asleep. Nothing is moving. He gets personal with the city because he knows that sleep is motionless and quiet. rejuvenating it is. Another image is the river gliding at his own sweet will. Now some people might read into this image but I believe it just means that the river was flowing slowly and quietly. For example, someone driving slowly to observe the view and take in the sun, not going fast just to make everyone else happy. The speaker often uses words that describe the lighting of the landscape. In line eight he says bright and glittering was the sky. He also explains that it was very sunny on that particular morning. These images in Composed upon Westminster Bridge create a quiet, tranquil mood. The images touch us and calm us because we can relate to them. Wordsworth continues to surprise his reader by saying that the sun has never shone more beautifully, even on natural things. He then personifies the scene, giving life to the sun, the river, the houses, and finally to the whole city, which has a symbolic heart. The reader imagines that the city's heart beats rapidly during the day, while everything and We know sleep is very good and understand how

everyone in it is bustling about, but now, in the early morning hours, the city's heart is "lying still." By using personification in his poem, Wordsworth brings a kind of spirit to the city, which is usually seen as a simple construction of rock and metal.

D. Summary Composed Upon Westminister Bridge is a poetry composed by William Wordsworth, a main character whom the story of the poetry is narrated. In this narrativestyled poetry, Wordsworth is standing on the Westminister Bridge early in the morning and describing the beauty of London through his emotions regarding nature. Wordsworth is admiring the calmness and peacefulness of the morning. In, Composed Upon Westminister Bridge, the city of London is portrayed as "a garment wear in the very early morning setting." This detail points out the resting calmness of the city during that time. Also, the city of London looks very calm since everything is at rest. It seems as though the whole city is asleep. "The beauty of the morning; silent, bare. Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie open unto fields, and to the sky." The river flows quietly as well. "The river glideth at his own sweet will." Lastly, the calmness and quiet make sun rays shine deep into every corner of the valley. "Never did sun more

beautifully sleep in his first splendor valley, rock, or hill;" Wordsworth is feeling strong emotions toward nature of this Quiet. He is quoted as saying, "Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!. The poetry creates the imagery of a peaceful city with a beautifully glittering sun and a quietly flowing river in the early morning. The calm tone of the poem appreciates the beauty of nature and is the main theme of this work. In Composed Upon Westminister Bridge, Wordsworth shows his sensibility and passion toward nature which makes a metropolitan city like London appear exceptionally beautiful.