“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Introduction

• “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” is a sonnet written by William Wordsworth, arguably the most prominent of the English Romantic Poets. The title marks a specific place and time—a viewpoint over London’s River Thames during the Industrial Revolution—and is typical of Wordsworth, whose work often deals with both the power and fleeting nature of remembered moments. The poem’s speaker contemplates the city at dawn, seeing it for its breathtaking beauty while also acknowledging the industrial forces transforming it. When published, the poem appeared alongside sonnets that explicitly criticized industrial England.

• Read the full text of “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Summary

• No sight on Earth is more beautiful than the view from Westminster Bridge. In fact, only someone suffering from a severe spiritual deficiency could walk by without noticing the view, which is emotionally stirring in its all-encompassing magnificence. London is wearing the clear, soft light of dawn like a piece of clothing. Undisturbed by human activity, the city’s many different buildings stretch outward and upward, until they blend into the surrounding farmland and overarching sky. The city shines like a diamond, and the air is clear. The sunlight has never shone on any feature of the natural landscape more beautifully than it now shines on the city as a whole. I've never seen nor felt such pure and unwavering tranquility. The river flows easily, guided only by the forces of nature. My God, even the houses seem like they’re sleeping. The whole city is like a single, immensely powerful object that for the moment remains inactive.

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Themes

• 

  Nature vs. Civilization

  In “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” the speaker contemplates early-morning London from a bridge. In the clear, quiet dawn, the speaker’s takes in the city and its natural surroundings, seeing them as both separate and unified. By comparing the city to the natural world that surrounds it, the poem emphasizes the challenge of locating a clear border between the two. The poem arguably goes so far as to suggest that there isn’t one, and that the city itself is an extension of nature.

  With its title, the poem opens with an image of a bridge—a symbol of the bond between the human and the natural world. A bridge is a human-made structure that spans a natural feature (in this case, the River Thames). It puts distance between people and the water yet also creates a space for people to appreciate the water from a new angle. In that sense, the bridge allows people to both overcome nature and immerse themselves in it more deeply. As an image, then, this bridge represents the link between these two worlds.

  The poem’s first lines then develop the connection between the city and nature by describing the city itself as a natural feature of the Earth. In fact, according to the speaker, the city is actually better looking than any other feature of “Earth,” to the point that the sight of it is “touching.” “Earth” is a word that more strongly connotes the planet’s green and blue wilderness than the image of a city, yet in the speaker’s description, the Earth seems proud to “show”—as in “show off”—early-morning London as if the city were its offspring.

  The speaker also challenges perceived borders between nature and the city. The speaker lists some of the manmade structures he or she looks upon—“Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples,” which at first might suggest a contrast between urban and natural scenery. Yet even as their variety is evidence of human beings’ technical skill, it is also indebted to the various forms of nature: mountains, cliffs, canyons, trees, etc. These structures lie “Open unto the fields,” as if to acknowledge their debt, “and to the sky,” as if to locate both the city’s aspirations and its limits. Furthermore, the city’s openness suggests a fluid border—that there is no clear line where the city ends and nature begins. This is further exemplified when the speaker notes that the river glides through the city “at his own sweet will.”

  Finally, the poem judges this mix of city and nature as somehow even better than “pure” nature. In fact, the city seems the ideal stage for contemplating the “beauty of the morning,” as the morning sunlight is somehow better appreciated when cast upon the waking city. “Never did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill,” the speaker says. Rather than reveal the city’s ugliness, the sunlight enhances its fairness. The cityscape seems to glitter with more majesty than “valley, rock, or hill” ever did. Like mountains, the buildings are also “silent” and “bare”—imagery that suggests the city itself as a place of peace and renewal.

  It’s worth noting that Wordsworth wrote this poem during the Industrial Revolution, meaning that the idyllic London his speaker describes was probably far from the reality of urban life at the time. In this sense, the poem can also be understood as a vision of what an ideal city could be, or perhaps simply an overly rosy vision spurred by the relative clarity of a morning not yet encumbered by the smoke of industry.

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• 

  Individuality vs. Community

  In describing London, the poem’s first-person speaker alludes to a range of human experience. The poem emphasizes a tension between the individual speaker and the city he or she observes, implicitly questioning how best to conceive of a city’s identity: does a city actually have an identity, or is it just a bunch of disparate pieces in close proximity? By expressing opinions in the first person and personifying aspects of the city, the poem suggests it’s possible to look at it both ways—specifically, that an individual perspective helps us see the city as a unified whole. The poem both acknowledges the city’s size and diversity while asserting that it has a unique and cohesive identity based on its many disparate parts.

  From the beginning, the poem emphasizes that its perspective is both limited and panoramic. The title precisely identifies time and place: “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” Its specificity narrows the perspective to a single spot in a single moment in time. However, from this precise location, the speaker is positioned to take in a broad and inclusive view of the city.

  The poem’s first three lines further emphasize the tension between the individual and the city, or between the part and the whole. Because they make opinionated claims about the beauty of the city, the first two lines confirm that a single city-dweller (or city-visitor) is speaking. The third line, however, widens the scope. This poem isn't about particular street-level relationships, but rather about the broader, vaguer “majesty” of the city; though filtered through one person's perspective, this is a poem about the whole of London. And by speaking with such conviction, the speaker suggests that the sight of the city can be emotionally stirring for any viewer. The speaker, therefore, prepares to participate in the collective of the city’s literal waking, an experience that’s all the more “touching”—more majestic—when shared.

  At the same time, the speaker sees the city for its resemblance to a single person who, “like a garment” wears the “beauty of the morning.” In this way, the speaker conditions the reader to the contradiction of one (i.e. the city) equaling many (i.e. its many distinct inhabitants). The speaker also seems to be reminding the reader that the city would not exist if it weren’t for living, breathing human beings. Though writing during a time of exploding industry, the speaker asserts that, more than any factory, people are what make up a city’s identity.

  The speaker concludes with a striking image that represents both the individual city-dweller and the city as a whole: “the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!” The speaker notably moves from the plural “houses” to the singular “heart,” a metaphor for the sleeping city. Again, this suggests that the city’s many individual residents together form one identity. This heart is a giant life force, on the brink of setting over a million lives into motion. The “mightiness” of this solitary heart ends the poem on a note of strength: the unified identity of the city is what gives it, and all the individuals who live there, potential.

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• 

  Fleeting Beauty

  The poem takes place at dawn, a moment of fleeting tranquility before the city wakes up and interrupts the speaker’s calm. This sense of impermanence infuses every aspect of the poem. It repeatedly reminds the reader that the city represents change, in the sense that it has transformed the landscape and reordered human life. Thus, the poem argues that beauty and tranquility are impermanent—but it also insists that despite the change, beauty can always be recovered.

  From its opening lines, the poem describes a version of the city that will not last. The city is “fair” and “touching in its majesty.” In the morning sunlight, it is “silent” and “bare.” The speaker does not say what will come next, but given what we know about London during the Industrial Revolution, we can safely assume that noise and roughness will replace the silence and fairness once people wake up and start going to work. Other pieces of the poem’s context also imply the impermanence of the speaker’s vision. Presumably the speaker is in transit, not just standing on the bridge, but walking across it. The day is specified too, emphasizing the momentary nature of the vision.

  By omitting, or merely hinting at, the characteristic features of an industrial city, the poem emphasizes the impermanence of what the speaker sees. The speaker describes the spread of buildings as “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.” With the words “bright” and “glittering,” the speaker conveys a sense of total clarity. But this clarity only exists thanks to the absence of smoke in the air. The speaker implicitly reminds readers that the city will only look this way as long as the factories aren’t churning.

  Also unusual in a busy industrial city, the “river glideth” without anything blocking or diverting it. The river runs “at his own sweet will,” that is, without human interference. This tranquil image contributes to the speaker’s deep calm. Given the context of the poem, however, it’s arguable that the speaker says this knowing that, given the factories and slaughterhouses that line its banks, the river is growing more polluted—and less naturally beautiful—every day.

  The ecstatic language in the second half of the poem suggests that despite the constant change, an attentive observer can always find beauty in the city. The speaker describes the city as if seeing it for the first time. “Never” did the sun “steep” anything so beautifully in its light; “Ne’er” has the speaker felt a “calm so deep.” From the earlier descriptions, it’s clear the speaker understands this beauty’s fleetingness. These ecstatic expressions of a fresh vision suggest that the fleetingness makes the beauty more emotionally moving, because it’s so precious. The poem suggests that by embracing the stillness, silence, and clarity of mornings such as these, the city-dweller can learn to appreciate the briefly beautiful moments that only a city can offer.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

• Line 1

  Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

  The first line of models the rest of the poem, hinting at its main themes, giving information about the speaker, and previewing the way in which the poem will both adhere to and subvert the Italian sonnet form.

  Read alongside the title, the first word, “Earth,” introduces the theme of nature vs. civilization. The title indicates that the setting of the poem is Westminster Bridge, a manmade structure in an urban environment that spans a natural feature (the Thames River). Rather than start with the specific view from the bridge, however, the poem starts with a comprehensive view of the entire planet. Earth, which has the ability to “show,” is personified. This attention to Earth tells the reader that the poem will consider the city’s place within the natural world.

  The line also gives the reader information about the speaker. There’s a lot of confidence in the opening declaration. By professing certainty about the highly arguable claim that nothing is “more fair” than the view from the bridge, the speaker emphasizes that this is a poem told from the limited, and possibly unreliable, perspective of one person.

  In its imperfect iambic pentameter, the line’s meter imitates the way this person might actually talk. Not every foot in the line is unstressed-stressed, however, as it would be if it were written purely in iambic pentameter:

  Earth has | not an | ything | to show | more fair:

  The first foot is actually a trochee, a syllable pair that is stressed-unstressed—the reverse of an iamb. This trochee places extra emphasis on the word “Earth,” and allows the speaker to begin on an assertive note with perhaps a hint of a challenge (that is, for someone to reveal anything fairer than the city before the speaker). The line also resembles the real speech of a city-dweller.

  The line does end with an iamb, the stress of which highlights the word “fair,” as well as with a colon, which creates an end-stopped line. This clear end-stop forces the reader to pause and consider the boldness of this opening statement, while the use of "fair" marks an instance of both adhering to and breaking with tradition: it was not uncommon in 1802 England to use “fair” to signify beauty, as Wordsworth does here. But to describe smelly, industrial London? That may have come as a surprise!

• Lines 2-3

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
  A sight so touching in its majesty:

  

  

• Lines 4-5

  This City now doth, like a garment, wear
  The beauty of the morning;

  

  

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• Lines 5-7

  silent, bare,
  Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
  Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

  

  

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• Line 8

  All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

  

  

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• Lines 9-10

  Never did sun more beautifully steep
  In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

  

  

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• Line 11

  Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

  

  

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• Line 12

  The river glideth at his own sweet will:

  

  

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• Lines 13-14

  Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
  And all that mighty heart is lying still!

  

  

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“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Symbols

• 

  Morning

  The poem repeatedly calls attention to the fact that it’s morning to depict a waking city that, though quiet and beautiful at dawn, will quickly recede into the smoke and noise of industry. The fleeting dawn represents impermanent beauty, and as the poem develops the speaker gains a greater appreciation for that impermanence.

  Line 5 is the first to actually state that it’s morning, but once the reader knows this, the preceding lines take on a different color. If it’s morning, that means the speaker, who is standing on Westminster Bridge, is watching the sun rise over London, a moment that will not last. In the first description of morning, the city wears the sunlight “like a garment.” In that sunlight, all the buildings are “silent” and “bare.” There is silence and pureness to the first moments of the morning, just as there might be in the sliver of a moment before a human wakes up.

  In line 8, the city is summed up as “bright and glittering in the smokeless air.” The buildings appear this way because of the morning sunlight, but that sunlight, the line implies, will soon be blocked by smoke. Later, in line 9, the morning sunlight grows more intense. The brief dawn has passed, and the sun “steep[s]” the city in a rich light, as if filling it with the energy it needs to start the day. There is “splendour” in this moment, says the speaker, but soon, thanks to the human activity it powers, that splendor will subside.

  Finally, in lines 13 and 14, the poem returns to the image of waking: the “houses seem asleep” and the “heart is lying still.” But the city is not, in fact, asleep—or if it is, it won’t be for long. The poem’s exclamatory end reminds readers that this state of inactivity, like the morning, will soon end, bringing with it a total transformation of the city and the individual’s experience of it.

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“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Hyperbole

  The poem uses hyperbolic language in three places: lines 1, 9, and 11. In these lines, the speaker declares that London at dawn is the most beautiful, tranquil sight on Earth. What’s notable about this hyperbole is that the speaker uses it sincerely—overwhelmed by the moment, he or she truly believes that the sight is the most beautiful on Earth. While the lines sound hyperbolic to the reader, they may not sound that way to the speaker.

  Even so, the first line of the poem is an opinion stated as fact, a clear sign of hyperbolic language. In it, the speaker claims that of all that the planet contains, both natural and human made, nothing is “more fair” than this vision of London at dawn. The line’s careful word choice emphasizes the hyperbole. By opening with the all-encompassing “Earth,” the speaker applies judgment to one of the largest fields possible, increasing the likelihood of the claim being hyperbolic.

  When the speaker makes the claim, he or she uses “not any thing” rather than “nothing.” While this serves the technical purpose of giving the line an extra syllable so that it conforms to the 10-syllable pentameter (though it’s not purely iambic), it also stretches the claim’s key language. “In case there’s any doubt,” the speaker seems to be saying, “I’m going to enunciate my point clearly.” Given that the poem doesn’t speak merely for England or Europe, but the entire world, the reader might be justified in wondering on what authority the speaker makes this claim, but given the description that follows, it seems more sincere than self-conscious.

  In lines 9 and 11, the speaker returns with hyperbolic language to describe the visual and emotional effects of the interaction between the sun and the city’s buildings. As in line 1, these lines use negative language (in line 1, “not any thing,” and here, repetition of “never”) to get across a simple point: the moment is incomparably beautiful. Line 9 reads almost as a repetition of line 1, except the sun takes the place of the Earth. The Earth has nothing more fair to show off, and the sun, at this moment, is at the top of “his” game in warmly illuminating the city. Here, the sun and Earth are teammates in a cosmic system, funneling all their powers of demonstration and illumination into the view of London from the River Thames.

  If that sounds far-fetched, it’s because it is—it's hyperbolic. But line 11, while it deepens the hyperbole, provides an answer to the question raised in line 1, namely, on what authority does the speaker make his or her claim? In a poem told entirely from a single perspective, line 11 contains the first use of “I,” reminding the reader that as absolute as these claims may seem, they represent just one person's view of the world.

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• Personification

  

  
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• Paradox

  

  

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• Anaphora

  

  

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

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• Sibilance

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

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• Enjambment

  

  

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"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Fair
• Touching
• Doth
• Bare
• Glittering
• Smokeless
• Steep
• Splendour
• Glideth
• Mighty heart

• “Fair” is an adjective whose primary meaning here is “beautiful.” It can also be taken to mean “light,” in reference to the sunlight at dawn, and “pleasant,” which applies to the clear, cloudless weather.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

• Form

  The poem is an Italian sonnet (also known as a Petrarchan sonnet), a 14-line poem broken into an octave (eight lines, or two quatrains) and a sestet (six lines, or two tercets). In a traditional Italian sonnet, the octave is supposed to present the “proposition,” or a sort of problem. In the sestet, with what’s known as the “turn,” the poem is supposed to address or resolve that problem.

  This poem doesn’t exactly follow that structure—arguably, the view of the city described in the octave isn’t a problem, and the sestet doesn’t go about solving it. But if we apply the definition of the Italian sonnet more loosely, the poem does follow its form. The octave presents an image of the city, and the sestet describes the emotional effect of that view on the speaker.

  Furthermore, the image undergoes a transformation in the sestet. Here, there's another slight deviation from the Italian sonnet. Traditionally, the turn is supposed to start with the sestet. Though line 9 does enact a turn by beginning to comment on the image from the octave, there’s an even sharper turn closer to the end of the poem. In the last two lines, the speaker cries out to God and sees the city as a massive heart. In this way, Wordsworth integrates a touch of the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet, whose turn occurs in the concluding couplet.

• Meter

  Most sonnets written in English follow iambic pentameter, but the lines are pretty irregular. In all his poetry, Wordsworth aimed to represent common speech, the type he might have heard in London in 1802. The poem’s more flexible meter lends authenticity to the speaker’s description of the city, and spontaneity to the speaker's reactions to it. The stresses of the lines also often serve to emphasize specific words and reflect the speaker's strong emotions.

  Starting with line 1, it’s clear that the poem has broken with strict metrical convention:

  Earth has | not a- | ny thing | to show | more fair:

  Rather than begin with the unstressed-stressed syllable pair of the iamb, the poem starts with its reverse, the trochee, a stressed-unstressed foot that has a bold quality. The speaker begins the poem on an assertive note that reflects the speaker's conviction in the city's "fairness." As the first word and a stressed syllable, “Earth” is emphasized, signaling that the poem will deal just as much with nature as the city. Trochees repeat in the first feet of lines 9 and 11 as well, adding forcefulness—a sort of oomph—to the word "never."

  In line 6, Wordsworth makes use of stressed syllables in a different way, to clarify the poem’s images:

  Ships, tow- | ers, domes, | theatres, |and tem- | ples lie

  Here, all the one-syllable buildings are stressed, and all the two-syllable buildings are trochees, which again, give the words a sort of heaving, emphatic quality, as if the buildings are rising firmly from the ground.

  In line 4 and line 13, the opening spondees (stressed-stressed) reflect the intense emotion as the speaker beholds the city and later calls out to God:

  This City

  And:

  Dear God!

  Importantly, at the end of the poem—and the end of the speaker’s emotional development—the rhythm falls into pure iambic pentameter:

  And all | that migh- | ty heart | is ly- | ing still!

  The speaker describes the city in many different ways in the poem, as if searching for the proper image. The search gives the poem a meandering and sometimes spontaneous quality that finally arrives at the “mighty heart.” With the exclamation mark, this conclusion is resounding and confident, and those qualities are reinforced by the steady beat of iambic pentameter (even if the heart, “lying still,” does not beat).

• Rhyme Scheme

  The typical rhyme scheme for an Italian sonnet is ABBAABBA for the octave and either CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet, and this poem follows that faithfully (it goes with the latter of the sestet options):

  ABBAABBA CDCDCD

  The only spot where it diverges is in line 3, where the poem has a slant rhyme. “Majesty” doesn’t rhyme exactly with “by,” “lie,” or “sky.” This could draw attention to outlying words, but it’s probably more likely to go unnoticed. Since the slant rhyme occurs in line 3, the reader can’t yet be certain that the poem is supposed to rhyme at all.

  In fact, despite the obvious rhyme scheme, it’s easy to read the entire poem without paying too much attention to rhyme. Thanks to a few cases of enjambment, some of the rhymes blend seamlessly into the next line (for example, between “lie” in line 7 and “Open” in line 8, the emphasis is on “Open,” softening its rhyme with “sky”).

  There are also a few cases of internal rhyme in the poem. In line 2, “Dull” is a slant rhyme with “soul," as is “more” in line 9 with “splendour” in line 10. But these rhymes are subtle, and perhaps meant to go unnoticed. Wordsworth was heavily concerned with representing authentic human speech in his poetry. Writing about a city, a huge container of human life, that concern may have been exaggerated. It’s no surprise that in rhyming his lines he opted for the subtle over the obvious.

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Speaker

• The speaker of “Westminster Bridge” has no name, gender, or identifying features. Given biographical information, one could argue that the speaker is Wordsworth, but the poem itself contains none of that information.

  What is clear is that the speaker is a person who is surprised, delighted, conflicted about, and in awe of the view of the city. The view is powerful enough to give the speaker what at first sounds like absolute confidence: “Earth has not anything to show more fair.” And later: “Never did the sun more beautifully steep.” But the poem’s careful descriptions reveal that the speaker is at least on some level conscious of the contradictions in the pretty view. The buildings are “bright and glittering,” but only because the air is “smokeless.” In the final image, the speaker sees the whole city—a collection of over a million people—as a single heart. By developing toward the “mighty heart” lying in wait, the most striking and ambiguous image of the poem, the speaker comes across as aware of the fleeting nature of the city’s tranquility.

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Setting

• As its title spells out, the setting for the poem is Westminster Bridge, which spans the River Thames in London, on September 3, 1802. Westminster Bridge is now, and was then, in a notable location in London. In 1802, its west bank was home to the British Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey stands a bit more to the west.

  The year 1802 is important for two reasons. One, it tells readers that the poem was written about London during the Industrial Revolution, a period of major growth and change for the city. Two, it means that the French Revolution was still fresh in the memory of Europe. Though distraught over its devolution into Reign of Terror, Wordsworth was deeply influenced by democratic principles espoused by the French revolutionaries. Even though the poem itself makes no mention of any of this context, it helps readers understand the poem's efforts to see a sort of democratic beauty in the sprawling urban landscape.

Literary and Historical Context of “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

• Literary Context

  Though he presumably wrote it in 1802, Wordsworth published “Westminster Bridge” in a collection titled Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The collection contains some of Wordsworth’s best known poems, such as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” in which the speaker indulges in an activity typical of Wordsworth: using the “inward eye” to reflect on a moment of previous tranquility in nature. “Westminster Bridge” is one of a cluster of sonnets that focus on humanity's impact on the world, but it differs from the others in its apparent optimism. In “London, 1802,” for example, England is described as a place of “stagnant waters” and “selfish men.” In “The World Is Too Much With Us,” Wordsworth condemns the state of the English people, saying “We have given our hearts away.” William Blake's "London," written around the same time, is also decidedly darker in its depiction of the city than is this poem. Though “Westminster Bridge” acknowledges human beings’ violent impact, especially evident in cities, it also encourages its readers to revise their view of the dirty, smelly, smoky, and all-around bad industrial city.

  Wordsworth was a leader among England’s Romantic poets, solidifying a tradition that started with William Blake in the late 18th century and was expanded upon by poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats toward the middle of the 19th century. Like his peers, Wordsworth questioned much of the established political and literary thinking of the time, especially between the 1790s and the early 1800s. His visits to France in the years following the French Revolution stoked in him a kind of democratic fervor that he would try to incorporate into his poetry. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a long introduction to the 1800 version of a book that featured both his poems and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), he insisted that poetry “arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings” uses “a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language.” In this essay, he also famously asserted that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

  His goal to use the language of common people in his poetry was similar to that of one of his major influences, the 17th-century English poet John Milton. Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802,” starts with an apostrophe to Milton, and begs the author of Paradise Lost to “raise us up, return to us again; / And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.” Wordsworth’s plans to revitalize English poetry were not entirely revolutionary in nature, drawing in part on a conservative attachment to the past.

  Historical Context

  In 1802, Europe was undergoing the First Industrial Revolution. As machine manufacturing replaced the agrarian economy, cities like London grew, and people started making a much more noticeable impact on nature. The technological change also resulted in societal upheaval. In 1811, for example, a group of English textile workers known as the Luddites rebelled against their employers, destroying the machines that had begun to replace them.

  Also at this time, the French Revolution was a recent memory. Wordsworth was highly sympathetic to the French democratic causes, though disgusted by the ensuing Reign of Terror. While living in France in the early 1790s, Wordsworth met and fell in love with Annette Vallon, and in 1792 she gave birth to their daughter Caroline. According to the journals of Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy (who was also a poet), “Westminster Bridge” was conceived on the morning of her departure with her brother to Calais, France. The purpose of the trip was to visit Caroline, whom Wordsworth had never met, and inform Annette of Wordsworth’s plans to marry his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth put down a record of this visit, too. In the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," he describes walking on the beach with Caroline, at sunset.

More “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” Resources

• External Resources

  • Ian McKellen Reads “Westminster Bridge” — Watch the British actor, of Lord of the Rings fame, read the poem in his own dramatic interpretation. 

  • Poetry Pairing — Read “Westminster Bridge” alongside a more recent travel article about London.

  • William Wordsworth's Biography — A medium-length biography of William Wordsworth, including information about his upbringing, political beliefs, poetic theories, and contemporary poets. 

  • William Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads — A long essay in which Wordsworth articulates his theory about what poetry should be, and explains how he goes about making it.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Wordsworth

  • A Complaint

  • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

  • Expostulation and Reply

  • Extract from The Prelude (Boat Stealing)

  • It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free

  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men

  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

  • Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

  • Lines Written in Early Spring

  • London, 1802

  • Mutability

  • My Heart Leaps Up

  • Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

  • She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways

  • She was a Phantom of Delight

  • Strange fits of passion have I known

  • Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  • The Solitary Reaper

  • The Tables Turned

  • The World Is Too Much With Us

  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower

  • To a Snowdrop

  • We Are Seven