A Very Personal Reflection on Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge"

16 March, 2012

At sunrise this morning, I stood alongside Pocatello’s greenbelt.  The Portneuf on this side of town has no cement walls, and freely feeds its life into the surrounding foliage.  It strides, faithfully, aside warehouses and railroad.  Nowhere else in this city have I seen a more proper analogue to what Wordsworth describes in “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge: September 2, 1802.”  The contrast of Nature and Industry, and the peculiar agreement they come to just before the start of day, is strong enough to glimpse a dim shadow of what that great City, London, must have been like on that still morning, more than 200 years ago.

            Wordsworth pictures the City, for all its grand architecture and innovation (“Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples”; 6) lying “open” under the sky and burgeoning sunlight: “The City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning” (4-5a).  This metaphor juxtaposes itself with the implied “garment” that London puts on throughout the busy daytime: the air is now “smokeless” (8), which is striking because industrial London is usually covered in the manmade cloak of factory smoke.

Pocatello has not, relatively speaking, a smog problem.  But there are many types of pollution in this world which are akin to Wordsworth’s sentiment.  He notes also that the City is abnormally “silent” (5), devoid of its typical noise pollution.  More than once I have stood on the Portneuf’s western banks awaiting daybreak.  Once I stood for nearly half an hour, hearing almost nothing except for the offensive crunching of the frozen grass under my abominable shoes.  That weekday began, and my internal hush was wrecked, by the startling arrival of a minivan to a house across the way.  It came, horns blaring, to summon a fellow carpooler from his front door.  I remembered a few lines I had once scribbled on a similar morning:

It was as if I had sinned.
My car shot off and shot off
The wings of the dawn.
The truck at the ‘T’
Trashed and crashed through
One thousand panes of glass –
The atmosphere it seemed:
The air owned that right-of-way,
It seemed.

There seemed to be a majestic holiness in the atmosphere.  The silence was so profound and dense, that I felt my smallest movements presumptuous and irreverent.  It is this kind of atmosphere, brought about by the sleepy submission of Man’s great industrious “heart” (14) before the awe-full beauty of the morning that Wordsworth finds so compelling. 

He goes further: “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty” (2-3).  Though Wordsworth insists that beauty is half-created by the perceiver, he is far from believing that all “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  By saying that only a man of dull sensibilities could pass the scene ignorant of its majesty, he demands there is something there: something worthy of admiration.  This, I think, is key to a proper understanding of his half-created/half-perceived meditation on beauty.  Not all opinions on a scenery experience are equally appropriate: the poetic sense is keenly tuned to pick up on beauty where it lies. 

Wordsworth would have us “feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness” (“Expostulation and Reply” 23-24).  This is how the poetic sensibility is cultivated.  When he saw busy London so hushed, even from sleep, I think his chief emotion was hope: “Dear God!” he responds, “the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!” (13-14).  This stands in contrast to his dejection in “Lines Written in Early Spring,” where, sitting in the midst of his grove, he looked into his own “human soul” and said, “much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man” (6-8).  But as “Westminster Bridge” displays, Wordsworth cannot long remain dejected.  For all the Romantics, he is particularly moralistic; and for this purpose he chooses a posture of optimism, for as fate and pessimism go hand-in-hand, so does optimism with self-improvement.

On the same morning in which I “shot off / The wings of the dawn,” I was driving through Portland.  The loud streets and gaudy billboards had me in low spirits after such a majestic morning.  Then, looking closer to the way the sunlight danced on buildings and signs, and with windows rolled low, listening to the wind sweep through all the city’s cracks, I was struck by the remnant beauty of it all.  Thinking of Wordsworth’s “What man has made of man,” yet still uplifted in hope, I wrote the following:

I enjoyed my first smoke in months

When I saw what the light was doing.
Just as it had these weeks and months,
Yet now I traced its moving!
Through lip and ’stache of brushy green
Breathy whispers, woven, trilled.
And though those trees were far between,
What Man had felled was filled.

And could it be (not even now?)

(Try as we may) has Hell not found
Upon this earth one small green lawn
To claim and name, lay full her scythe upon?
For down I was, the floor against,
Under light and air’s cosmic sea,
Where Heaven pressed with Hush so dense,
Gracing all that I could see.