On Westminster Bridge (1743, 1803)

 

Something a little different on this blog today: Wordsworth rather than Coleridge. But interesting, I think.

There, at the head of the post, is Canaletto's splendid painting ‘London: Westminster Bridge from the North on Lord Mayor's Day’ (1747). 

There were several projects to build a bridge across the river at Westminster in the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries, all stymied by the Corporation of London, who wanted to preserve the rights and income of the barge- and ferrymen who worked the crossing. But eventually, in 1736, an Act of Parliament approved the project. Privately financed (including by a lottery), construction started in 1739 under the supervision of Swiss engineer Charles Labelye, who had invented a new technology, ‘caissons’ (sealed underwater structures supplied with air from above in which workman could dig the foundations for the bridge's piers into the riverbed). The bridge opened on 18 November 1750. 

It was on this structure that Wordsworth stood, early in the morning of September 3rd 1803. From that vantage he wrote this very famous sonnet:

Earth has not any thing 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 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!

The date of composition is in the title of the poem. 

There's a nice piece of wordplay, a mode actually of irony, here. The poem is ‘On Westminster Bridge’, and the poet is actually standing, physically, on Westminster bridge. This doubled sense of on as meaning ‘positioned physically upon’ and ‘concerning, about’ reverts on (!) the poem itself which, famously, doesn't talk about the bridge at all: it's all the houses and temples of London, and the river passing through, gliding at its own sweet will—it is, really, ‘From Westminster Bridge’, not on it at all. Although by the same token, Wordsworth could hardly write the poem without the bridge supporting him. And, as we read the sonnet, we can hardly avoid being struck by its poised tensions of contradictions: the city, an urban space, described entirely in pastoral terms, as if it were a natural phenomenon. The city is somehow both clothed in a ‘garment’ and naked, ‘bare’: its ‘majesty’ is low-key touching, hardly the affective response usually provoked by the awe-inspiring sublime force of majesty. And that final image of a heart lying perfectly still takes calmness too far into death.

To be clear: I am not accusing the poem of being incoherent, or more precisely I am not pegging these incoherences as a failing or a problem. Rather they exist, as do the engineering forces that hold the arches of a bridge in place and support the road overhead, in a mode of creative tension. This is an affecting, beautiful poem: a description of transcendent calm that is also an evocation of such calm, and poem very particularly placed in place (this specific London bridge) and time (September 3rd 1803) that is also placeless and timeless, the city Zion, the time paradise's eternal sunrise. Heart means we're at the centre of the city, which, being London, is in turn at the centre of the world. Which is to say, this poem, which critics discuss as if it never so much as mentions the bridge, ends with a reference to it: ‘lying’ over the river, the vantage-point from which everything is written. It's all on the bridge, after all.

Anyway: lately I have been reading some of the neo-Latin poetry of Englishman Vincent Bourne (1695-1747). (Here is a different blog I wrote about one of Vinny's poems). The later eighteenth-century and Romantic poets read him and thought highly of him. In a letter to the Reverend John Newton (10 May 1781) William Cowper declared ‘I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him.’ Coleridge owned a copy of The Poetical Works of Vincent Bourne and Charles Lamb translated eight of Bourne’s Latin poems into English, recommending him to Wordsworth: ‘since I saw you,’ Lamb wrote to WW in 1815, ‘I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day — the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town-scenes, a proper counterpart to some people’s extravagancies … what a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matterfull creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything. His diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him!’ [Ainger (ed) The Letters of Charles Lamb (1904), 1:341].

With that in mind, it's likely Wordsworth, writing his poem ‘on’ Westminster Bridge, was aware of this Bourne poem from Poematia (1743), ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’:

Tamisi, regales qui praeterlaberis arces,
quam se magnificum, suspice, tollit opus!
quanto cum saxis coalescunt pondere saxa!
quo nexu incumbens sustinet arcus onus!
ardua quam iusto pendet libramine moles      [5]
qua partes haerent partibus harmonia!
quos, cerne, ad numeros, ab utrovis litore sensim
sunt supra acclives alterutrinque viae!
pontis aperturae quam distant legibus aequis,
exterior quae vis interiore minor!                   [10]
hunc artis splendorem inter nihil impedit undas
quove minus placidus vel taciturnus eas.
nil tibi descensum accelerat; non vorticis ullus
impetus in praeceps unde ferantur aquae,
fluxu idem, refluxu idem, lenissimus amnis     [15]
incolumem subtus sternis, ut ante, viam:
seris indicium saec'lis quo principe tanta
haec tibi surrexit gloria, liber eris.

Westminster Bridge

O Thames, as you flow past regal citadels,
see what a fine structure has raised itself here!
With what heft does stone connect with stone!
How well the curving arch sustains its weight!
With perfect balance the tall structure hangs,   [5]
its parts assembled with such harmony!
And see how, ranked upon either shore,
the rising paths each balance either side!
How equidistant are this bridge's arches,
the outer smaller than the inner ones!               [10]
Through this wondrous art the unimpeded
river glideth calmly, silent onwards.
Nothing hurries your motion; no inrushing
whirlpool tangles the headlong current:
It flows the same, reflows the same, gently      [15]
passing safely underneath the paved road.
Later generations will admire the prince
who erected so great a glory: you'll be free.

This looks, on its face, like a very different poem to Wordsworth's, concerned solidly with the bridge itself from start to finish. Bourne does not describe the view from the bridge: understandably, since the bridge wasn't opened until 1750, seven years in the future as the poem is composed (and, in the event, after Bourne himself died). The only lines that, perhaps, Wordsworth Englishes in his Westminster Bridge poem are 11-16, describing the calmly gliding unimpeded flow of the river (Wordsworth's line 12 perhaps owes something to this).

But I'd suggest a different reading. Bourne's poem is about the fabric of the bridge, about the balance, the harmony and the tension of that structure: about what holds it up, maintains it. And that means it is about the structural qualities of poetry as well. Any poem is a balance between the interruptions to flow occasioned by the form and sturcture (metre and prosody, line-breaks, zeugmas and figures, sometimes rhyme) and the flow of the poem's musicality and sense. Bourne signed this poem Milliaria: that is, ‘columns’, ‘pillars’. He is thinking about the architectonics both of his subject and of his verse.

Look again at Bourne's piece: it addresses not the bridge but the river. Its focus is on the bridgework from the point of view of the river: how it interrupts, or doesn't, the flow of the Thames. We intuit a poet's point-of-view on the river (in a boat, perhaps). But Wordsworth, in his sonnet, is also on the river: which is to say, he is on a bridge on the river. We're on.

On the surface Bourne's poem looks like a panegyric to Westminster's bridge's solidity: its rock-fitted-against-rock heft and permanence. And the main rhetorical device is the counterpunctual μέν ... δέ on the one hand/on the other hand: ‘fluxu idem, refluxu idem’ [15] and so on—appropriate to a bridge, we could say, since a bridge links two banks in one span made up of linking arches. Estelle Haan notes the poem's anaphoric balance: ‘the symmetry that lies at the heart of the poem is replicated in its own syntax and structure, most noticeably in the seven successive rhetorical exclamations upon which the whole is balanced: quam (2), quanto (3), quo (4), quam (5), qua (6), quos (7), quam (9). Such exuberant anaphora is for the most part matched by respective line endings proclaiming individual aspects of the bridge's physical structure: its opus (2), saxa (3), onus (4), moles (5), harmonia (6)’ [Haan, ‘Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 97:1 (2007)101]

But Bourne's poem includes some similar ironies to Wordsworth's: the bridge's arches are aequis, equal, and yet some are bigger than others [10-11]; the bridge does not impede the flow of the river, and generates no whirlpools, and yet the poem very specifically describes the flow as a flux-reflux eddy.  

Most of all, the poem praises as finished and solidly secure a structure that was, in 1743, neither. On the contrary, the construction of the bridge was beset with reverses and controversy as Labelye went over-budget and over-deadline, struggling to get his new caisson technology to work, losing in total five boats over the course of the building with horrifying casualties among the workmen, and sourcing his stone from great distances with inevitable associated delays in shipping (much of it came from Swanage, and supplies were repeatedly interrupted when the navy pressed the cargo boat sailors for this or that military emergency). 

Nor was the finished bridge especially robust. It lasted a century, plagued with subsidence and requiring repeated and expensive remedial maintainance. Eventually the city decided it couldn't put up with it any longer, and commissioned Thomas Page to design a new bridge. Opened in 1862, this is the bridge currently standing, the lovely seven-arch, cast-iron structure linking Lambeth and Westminster that we all know and love.   

The controversy over the bridge was a live one in the 1740s, when Bourne was writing his poem. Here is the pamphlet published by London architect and designer Batty Langley in 1748: you can see from its title that he is not a fan.

A Survey of Westminster Bridge As Tis Now Sinking Into Ruin: this is two years before the bridge is even opened! Already sinking into ruin? Golly. Langley blames the design: the foundations inadequate to the weight of the whole. He would have designed it differently, he says, and he includes a diagram in which Labelye is shown, strikingly, hanging from a gibbet in the background.

Batty Langley was a fairly eccentric individual, but the opposition to the bridge came from many quarters. The Westminster Journal (2nd Sept 1742) published ‘A Lucubration on the Sinking of Westminster Bridge’.

This makes me wonder if we shouldn't read Bourne's poem as an ironic exercise? Is he praising for its solidity a structure everybody knew wasn't particularly solid? Irony is exactly the kind of structural or semiotic tension that is embodied by the stress-and-tension logic of the arch. Perhaps the ironies of Wordsworth's ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ are responding, in their way, to the ironies of Bourne's ‘Pons Westmonasteriensis’.