Poet's Corner

Explanation: "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"

Lines 1-3

The poem begins by giving accolades to a subject — the fairest thing on earth, a sight so "touching in its majesty" that only a dull person would pass it unnoticed. In these lines the speaker is discussing a subject he has yet to identify. The technique builds suspense, and increases our surprise when, in the following line, the subject is named.
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Lines 4-5

The simile of these lines — a city wearing the morning's beauty like a garment — is strange and arresting for at least two reasons: we do not normally think of cities as wearing anything, and it is difficult to conceive of how "beauty" might be a garment. But because the simile is so vivid, we are forced to stop while reading the resulting image, much as Wordsworth was made to stop by the sight of the city. In other words, we are made to feel what Wordsworth felt. The first two words of line 4 surprise us, especially if we are familiar with Wordsworth's other work and his belief that the city destroys many of the good qualities of humanity — sympathy, kindness, and a sense of the sublime. And it is clear that the city is beautiful precisely because it is wearing nothing.
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Lines 6-7

These lines work to explain the simile of line 4. In the nineteenth century, from certain places in London, one could see the fields and low hills which surrounded the city.
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Line 8

In the nineteenth century, homes and businesses were heated by wood and coal; consequently a great pall of smoke hung over the city almost continually. The absence of smoke is due to the season (summer, when rooms do not require heating) and the time of day (early morning, when no one is operating furnaces or cooking).
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Lines 9-10

The speaker is aware that he is using a tone, a vocabulary and a sense of reverence reserved for descriptions of waterfalls and mountain vistas. He compares this cityscape directly to them and finds it superior.
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Line 11

The sun illuminating a landscape with its light and so giving it beauty, described in lines 9-10, is in line 11 made parallel to the effect of the landscape on the speaker: as the sun illuminates the landscape, so the landscape illuminates (or supplies a calm to) the speaker. Also in this line the speaker has melded the external and the internal; he sees the "calm" of the city, and he feels a "calm" within himself. But by making the same word ("calm") the object of both verbs ("saw," and "felt"), Wordsworth connects his feeling to the feelings of the city.
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Line 12

This line is significant because it describes the only movement in the poem. And the river's movement is a glide — one imagines its surface so smooth that one cannot be certain it is moving at all. The entirety of the poem portrays a frozen moment in time, an extended image, a kind of snapshot.
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Line 14

The "mighty heart" means the rhythms of the city when its citizens are active. But the term recalls suggestions in Wordsworth's other poems of a single spirit which imbues everything that lives — a "world spirit" or an animus mundi. The significance here may be that Wordsworth, who in many works regards the city as separate from nature and by implication separate from that animus mundi — has here embraced it as part of nature. That the poem plays loosely within the sonnet form may be a reflection of this theme. Much as the city only seems separate from the natural world, so the sonnet form only seems separate from "language really used by men."
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Source: Exploring Poetry, Gale, 1997.