Friedrich’s ‘The Wanderer above a sea of fog’ 1818
[image credit: printedland.blogspot.com]

In the last post we walked some of the literary bye-ways of Charles Lamb, a true born and bred Londoner. This week we’re going to meet a friend of Lamb’s and giant of the Romantic period: William Wordsworth. The popular perception of Wordsworth conjures images of sublime landscapes, daffodils, marching clouds and solitary walkers. And the Lake District, rather than London, is his famous domain. But the poet who travelled widely across Europe and the UK paid many visits to the capital, and he immortalised his experiences of London in various writing.

Wordsworth’s epic biographical poem The Prelude begins with the poet feeling an ‘animating breeze’ as he escapes London, the ‘vast city where I long had pined/ A discontented sojourner’.  The young poet takes up the mantle that Milton gave the fallen Adam and Eve when they were expelled from Eden, and with ‘the world all before me’, finds a sense of freedom, even if his ‘chosen guide/ Be nothing better than a wandering cloud’. Having been famously dubbed the ‘Poet of nature’, it is unsurprising that he treats the urban environment as a Miltonesque pandemonium in Book VII: Residence in London. Approaching the city he surveys ‘A monstrous anthill on the plain / Of a too busy world’. Inside the city walls he finds ‘a hell for eyes and ears’:

What anarchy and din

Barbarian and infernal — ‘tis a dream

Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound!

Book VII is worth reading in full – as a taster, try this passage for a window on London’s multicultural scene at an annual fair at the dawn of the 19thCentury:

The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,

Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,

Blue-breeched, pink-vested, and with towering plumes.—

All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

The Stone-eater, the Man that swallows fire,

Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

The Bust that speaks, and moves its goggling eyes,

The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

Of man;

‘The face of everyone that passes by me’
[image credit: thesun.co.uk

But the magnificent pageantry of city life was overshadowed by the philosophical motive of the poem. Wordsworth’s innovation was to study in detail the emotional responses to living in a city, and described feelings of estrangement, awful and sublime, that you’ll still hear expressed today (maybe not in free verse):

O Friend! one feeling was there which belong'd

To this great City, by exclusive right;

How often in the overflowing streets

Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said

Unto myself. The face of everyone

That passes by me is a mystery!‘

Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed

By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,

Until the shapes before my eyes became

A second-sight procession such as glides

Over still mountains, or appears in dreams.

London at sunrise [image credit: thegreenwichphantom.co.uk]

They are lines easily remembered on Oxford Street, and might save you from a moment of pavement rage! For Wordsworth, the metropolis was too massive to comprehend, and, like the most awe-inspiring landscapes in his poetry, could inspire that transcendent experience called the Sublime. The perfect illustration of such a transformation is a sonnet Upon Westminster Bridge. So often frantic and stressful, London was for a moment still:

Earth hath 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 splendor, 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!

Imagine waking up to the city skyline glittering in the morning sunshine… Some of our members do just that every (sunny!) day. You could enjoy the view next time you’re in town too. See some of our favourites here:

http://www.onefinestay.com/london/the-boat-house/

http://www.onefinestay.com/london/deodar-road/

http://www.onefinestay.com/london/thurloe-square/