Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth
Some people, I know, want to be always near the bright lights and the busy hum of a city. I’m not one of them, but I have to confess sometimes a fascination with an old city’s myriad of streets where every kind of human activity goes on — in and around factories, schools, restaurants, theaters, parks, homes, churches with their bells ringing on Sunday morning; the liveliness is contagious. I’ve been in Florence on a calm summer evening, among a flock of people gathering around a burly fellow playing a harp on the Ponte Vecchio. I’ve walked down the parade of cherry trees along the mall in Washington. I’ve happily watched my small son scare up hundreds of pigeons in the piazza of Saint Mark’s, in Venice. Many a path through the woods I will have forgotten, but these memories will be with me all my life.
When I was a little boy in Pennsylvania, my parents gave me what was then my second favorite present ever (my favorite was my collie, Duke): it was a big fold-out map of Allentown, Pennsylvania. I would spread it out on the floor, gazing at the network of streets and committing them to memory. The small town where we soon returned to was too poor or too negligent to have street signs, so if you didn’t know where you were, you probably didn’t belong there anyhow, but I have sharp memories of the handsome old street signs in nearby Scranton, silver and gray, and mounted upon metal posts. Those signs are long gone, but not to me.
And I still have a hankering to drive down this street or that street, just to see what’s there, as if each street had a special character — in Scranton, the main east-west streets downtown paid honor to the presidents in order, beginning with Washington Avenue, duly preceded, two blocks away, by Penn and Franklin. It’s as if each street captured a slice of life: the Army-Navy Store where I bought a coat and a duffel bag was on Penn Avenue, if I remember, and there was an old H. Salt Fish and Chips restaurant on Mulberry Street, and as soon as you say “Laurel Street” to anybody from my home town, he’ll smile and say, “The baseball field!” And we can see it in the mind’s eye as it was: a sandlot for an infield, no fence in the outfield, the river down a steep embankment beyond the outfield, and an old train trestle, defunct, great gaps between the ties, which we’d cross to get from one end of town to the other, carefully, so as not to take the forty-foot fall.
Well, the author of our Poem of the Week, William Wordsworth, did not generally haunt the cities. His heart was in the Lake District of northwestern England, and in those woods and on those waters and under those quiet and star-powdered heavens he became one of our greatest and wisest poets. But in this sonnet today, he stands on a bridge over the Thames, in London, and looks out upon the mighty city, sleeping; a city of prodigious accomplishment, of influence all over the world; sometimes in later years so choked up with soot that the snow would look black; but here, washed and clean, gleaming with light, with the sun setting forth its glory to the human eye. It is so splendid, says Wordsworth, that he cannot compare with it anything he has ever seen in the natural world of hill and valley. Even the Thames, which in the novels of Dickens, later in the century, will so often mark men’s sorrows and struggles against poverty — think of Pip and Herbert, desperately trying to get the old repentant sinner Abel Magwitch downstream and away on board ship, far from the pursuit of the police — here “glideth at his own sweet will,” like a ribbon of beauty and peace.
Many a poet can write about what he naturally loves. It takes a Wordsworth to write what we have here.
Earth has not any thing 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!
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Learn more about our subscription tiers by clicking the button below.
