EMOTION RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY

There is a sonnet written by William Wordsworth entitled

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

describing London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. It was first published in the collection Poems in Two Volumes in 1807.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair:


Wordsworth

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 splendour, 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!

As to whether the sonnet was actually composed on the 3^rd September 1802, we have this entry from his sister Dorothy’s journal:

Dorothy Wordsworth

... we left London on Saturday morning at ½ past 5 or 6, the 31st July (I have forgot which) we mounted the Dover Coach at Charing Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St Paul’s, with the River & a multitude of little Boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature's own grand Spectacles

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal, Saturday 31st July 1802

The sonnet, or at least the journal entry, was written when William and Dorothy were passing through London travelling to Calais to visit Annette Vallon by whom he had a daughter Caroline, prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. That the sonnet so closely follows Dorothy's journal entry comes as no surprise because Dorothy wrote her Grasmere Journal to "give Wm pleasure by it" and it was freely available to Wordsworth, who said of Dorothy that "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears". Dorothy’s entry being dated the 31^st July 1802, does seem to indicate that there was some poetic licence as to the date mentioned in the title.

Poems in Two Volumes, included the likes of ‘I wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ‘The world is too much with us’, etc. There was a scathing review of the work by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sEcTJe38T4QC&pg=PA214&dq=Edinburgh+review+Wordsworth+Poems+in+Two+Volumes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jHfGT_DvHoeq-gbP69i-BQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Edinburgh%20review%20Wordsworth%20Poems%20in%20Two%20Volumes&f=false.

Francis Jeffrey

I confess I find Mr Jeffrey’s view convincing; however, there are many who find the piece appealing.

On another note for the 3rd September;

The Westerbork transit camp was a World War II Nazi refugee, detention and transit camp in Hooghalen, ten kilometres north of Westerbork, in the north-eastern Netherlands. Its function during the war was to assemble Roma and Dutch Jews for transport to other concentration camps.

Anne Frank, another diarist, stayed in the hut shown to the left from August until early September 1944, when she was taken to Auschwitz. She and her family were put on the first of the three final trains (the three final transports were most probably a reaction to the Allie’s offensive) on 3^rd September 1944 for Auschwitz, arriving there three days later.