I recently reread Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge,” written in 1802, and memorized the poem so I could share it with a friend on our walks along Pt. Isabel on the San Francisco Bay, with its clear view of other bridges–both the Gold Gate and the new, sparkling Bay Bridge across the water. Reciting the poem in that setting, both my friend and I were aware of the vast differences separating Wordsworth’s London and our San Francisco, shrouded in mist a few miles across the water to the west of us. Wordsworth’s London is set very much in nature. As he writes
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
These walks led me to the city streets to see for myself what this urban world was like in 2014. I soon took a small room in the inner city and began keeping a journal of the few days a month I spent there. Here are recent excerpts:
A festive air today in the streets. In the sunshine everyone is out. When I begin walking up Eddy from Market, a truck barrels along, spraying the street, not just with water, but disinfectant. The pungent, clean scent fills the air and sudsy water rolls along the gutters. The streets of the Tenderloin are like a café, with everyone out, talking in clusters, moving, eating, reading, or staring silently into the distance. Now everyone–-including myself––seems by association to be bathing, too, in the sudsy water. How much I love this place, and its people, and their lack of gentility! Today, these are my friends. As the wall art says, “the plural I”.
Night falls in the Tenderloin. At first the sky becomes intensely blue. I’m indoors at dusk. I adjust the blinds of my little room. For a while there is the noise of a fast-tempo radio. Then only an undercurrent of the ” mighty heart” as Wordsworth called it, of the city, the distant hum, a few high voices, heard only as single notes, not phrases. I find the hum soothing: ”Never have I see, nor felt, a calm so deep,” the poet wrote at Westminster Bridge 200 years ago. London then a very different city, one where the city—“ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie/ open unto the fields and to the sky”.
Morning in the City are cool. I pull up my blanket. I am too sleepy to get up to close the window. There is the hum of traffic–without the glitter of human voices at 5 a.m. That comes later, with sunrise. Later, moving along the sidewalk, I feel the pleasure of mingling with others who do not live through intellect or thought or speech, each for the moment seeming to be one unified organ of torso and heart. Daily, they hone the tactile and aural senses. This woman’s skin is smooth, a deep, burnished brown. That man’s muscles bulges on his forearms. Memorable is the big round chocolate man, young and vigorous, who swings his naked, fat, muscular arms around and calls out to no one in particular words I can’t make out. Maybe I am so captivated by his physique and physical presence that I do not pay attention to his words. In addition to his naked arms in a tank top,his huge round belly extends beyond his waistline. I hear a passerby mutter, “He’s just out of jail, but he’ll soon be going back.” It is then I see a plastic wristband on his arm.
In the depths of the City, there is perhaps more Blake or Dickens than Wordsworth.
Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
Earth has 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.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!