"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is a

Petrarchan sonnet The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is a sonnet named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, although it was not developed by Petrarch himself, but rather by a string of Renaissance poets.Spiller, Michael R. G. The Develop ...

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

describing

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and the

River Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

, viewed from

Westminster Bridge Westminster Bridge is a road-and-foot-traffic bridge over the River Thames in London, linking Westminster on the west side and Lambeth on the east side. The bridge is painted predominantly green, the same colour as the leather seats in the ...

in the early morning. It was first published in the collection '' Poems, in Two Volumes'' in 1807.

History

The sonnet was originally dated 1803, but this was corrected in later editions and the date of composition given precisely as 31 July 1802, when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were travelling to Calais to visit Annette Vallon and his daughter Caroline by Annette, prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. The sonnet has always been popular, escaping the generally excoriating reviews from critics such as

Francis Jeffrey Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (23 October 1773 – 26 January 1850) was a Scottish judge and literary critic. Life He was born at 7 Charles Street near Potterow in south Edinburgh, the son of George Jeffrey, a clerk in the Court of Session ...

in the '' Edinburgh Review'' when ''Poems in Two Volumes'' was first published. The reason undoubtedly lies in its great simplicity and beauty of language, turning on Dorothy's observation that this man-made spectacle is nevertheless one to be compared to nature's grandest natural spectacles.

Cleanth Brooks Cleanth Brooks ( ; October 16, 1906 – May 10, 1994) was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher ...

analysed the sonnet in these terms in ''

The Well Wrought Urn ''The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry'' is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza ...

: Studies in the Structure of Poetry''. Stephen Gill remarks that at the end of his life Wordsworth, engaged in editing his works, contemplated a revision even of "so perfect a poem" as this sonnet in response to an objection from a lady that London could not both be "bare" and "clothed" (an example of the use of paradox in literature). That the sonnet so closely follows Dorothy's journal entry comes as no surprise because Dorothy wrote her ''Grasmere Journal'' to "give Wm pleasure by it" and it was freely available to Wordsworth, who said of Dorothy that "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears" in his poem " The Sparrow's Nest".

References

Sources * * *

External links

''Poems: In Two Volumes''
by William Wordsworth. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807
''The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry''
by

and Paul Rand. Harcourt, Brace 1975
"Review of ''Poems, in Two Volumes''
by Francis Jeffrey, in '' Edinburgh Review'', pp. 214–231, vol. XI, October 1807 – January 1808 {{DEFAULTSORT:Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 1802 poems 1807 poems Poetry by William Wordsworth Sonnets Poems about cities Works about London Culture associated with the River Thames

History

References

Further reading

External links