19 pages • 38 minutes read
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
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Literary Devices
Petrarchan sonnet
Wordsworth published 523 sonnets, including one called “Scorn Not the Sonnet” (1827), in which he compares the sonnet to a key that helped Shakespeare unlock his heart and a lute whose melody “gave ease to Petrarch’s wound.”
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” is a Petrarchan sonnet. Like a Shakespearean sonnet, Petrarchan sonnets contain 14 lines. Unlike the Shakespearean sonnet, the Petrarchan Sonnet has a more irregular and complex rhyme scheme, an eight-line stanza (octave) rhyming ABBAABBA, and a six-line stanza (sestet) rhyming CDCDCD or CDECDE. This rhyme scheme creates a sense of musicality and order. It indicates that there is a flow and arrangement to the universe, perhaps designed by a benevolent deity, in keeping with Wordsworth’s religious convictions. Much like how the banks of a river contain an overwhelming flood of water, this structure can contain the abundant flow of feelings that Wordsworth often tries to convey in his poetry.
For Wordsworth, the sonnet, which means “little song,” is a structure that helps unlock feelings and create a sense of harmony and beauty. It is appropriate he used this form to delineate, or outline, the feelings he experienced while standing on Westminster Bridge, as the poem is about experiencing a moment of harmonious tranquility. Much like a sonnet, this moment also is brief, and the speaker is aware that it is a moment of repose that will be broken once the city awakens.
Diction
Wordsworth meant for his poems to be accessible to common people and to mimic the speech of common people. Not only does this poem dwell on a sight that may have been accessible or known to many in England at the time, but the diction of the poem is intentionally simple. There are virtually no allusions to other literary figures or references to the ancient Greeks and Romans or to the Bible. Rather, the poet chooses words that are mainly monosyllabic (words that only have one syllable) ones that ordinary and uneducated people would understand and use in everyday life.
Personification
Personification allows poets to give human attributes to non-human things. This allows poets to project their own feelings onto non-living, non-sentient objects. Nearly a decade after Wordsworth wrote “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” the poet Ezra Pound dubbed this “The Objective Correlative.” So, when Wordsworth writes, or the speaker says, “doth, like a garment, wear” (Line 4), he is projecting onto the sunlight a feeling that it conjures for him, the same feeling he might experience upon seeing a beautiful dress. Though, of course, the personification of London is not gendered in this poem, he does refer to it as a “she” in his earlier poem “London, 1802.” Presumably, referring to sunlight as a garment conjures for the speaker a vision of a garment that is made of gold, suggesting that the city is rich, and that the robes of the morning are luxurious. Perhaps the poem also suggests that nature itself is the giver of the wealth, as it is the sunlight which creates the golden color upon the buildings.
When the speaker declares, “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep” (Line 13), he is associating the houses with the sense of tranquility one might experience watching another person at rest. Likewise, he attributes to the river a sense of autonomy, suggesting that nature has a divine, enlightened, orderly will of its own. This has been discussed at some length above in the significance of the river as a symbol.
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By William Wordsworth
