Explore how the poets you have studied use different perceptions of London in order to convey thematic ideas
William Blake, who wrote ‘London’, and William Wordsworth, who wrote ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ are two poets from the Romantic period of the nineteenth century. Both have written a poem describing their feelings for the city of London, but they were written ten years apart. This is shown when reading the poems, as the each gives a very different perception to the other.
‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ is surprisingly written in the form of a Sonnet. A sonnet is composed of an octave first (eight lines) followed by a sextet (six lines). Sonnets are usually written about topics like love, passion, and desire; which is why it is unexpected that a poem describing a city so be written in this form. In writing the poem this way, the poet communicates his feelings of admiration and adoration for the city to the reader. Wordsworth gives the impression of femininity when addressing London, in the same way that someone may call their car ‘she’. He’s saying that London is like a beautiful woman and he admires it in the same way. What adds to this effect is how Wordsworth refers to other elements of the poem as ‘he’; ‘…In his first splendour, valley, rock or hill’, ‘the river glideth at his own sweet will’. This gives us the image that everything else is ugly and inferior to the beauty of the city.
