Sonnet a Day Challenge # 11: William Wordsworth

It’s more than a hundred and fifty years since our last sonneteer wrote. The form was not beloved of the 18th Century’s poets, who strove for a neoclassical grandeur that demanded large-scale forms, ratiocination, stability. It’s not that none were written, but the sonnet simply doesn’t have a natural home among the Augustans.

By Benjamin Haydon - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. English title source Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Plate 10., Public Domain, Link

Come the end of the century, though, and the Romantics revive the shorter form, as a compressed vehicle for exclamation and insight. Here is the greatest of the Romantics, William Wordsworth, taking the fourteen lines to gasp at a sudden perception of the city as an organic, human-free environment.

It’s a powerful outburst, but as with a lot of Wordsworth, it doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny: ‘the very houses seem asleep’ doesn’t really say what I think he thinks it does, and the poem’s vision of the city as abandoned, post-human, speaks to a misanthropic streak.

Nevertheless, who hasn’t been struck by the otherworldliness of deserted urban settings?

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

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.
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!

You can read more Wordsworth at his Poetry Foundation page.

The sonnet-a-day challenge, coming near the end now, began as a pub conversation with an artist friend who wasn't familiar with poetry. She tells me she has enjoyed it and learned from it. Upvote and resteem if you have too!