In celebration of Earth Day!

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
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.
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!

With Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet's views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

Wordsworth is a “Romantic” poet. To literary scholars, romantic poetry is poetry written in the Romantic period (1790-1830). Indeed Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats displayed what the common reader still expects of poetry: soaring imagination, emotional intensity, freshness of individual experience, plus a deep sense of myth and mystery in natural events. There also arose the notion of Fine Art, which was created out of nothing (or at least out its own matter, and certainly for its own sake) and therefore superior to an Applied Art adulterated with practical or commercial considerations. From movements leading to Romanticism arose aesthetics (the philosophy art), with all its current problems, and our contemporary art that illustrates or challenges these conceptions.

The poem is a sonnet. From the Italian sonetto, which means "a little sound or song," the sonnet is a popular classical form that has compelled poets for centuries. Traditionally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, which employ one of several rhyme schemes and adhere to a tightly structured thematic organization. Two sonnet forms provide the models from which all other sonnets are formed: the Petrachan and the Shakespearean.

The structure of sonnets makes them easy to memorize. I can recite Shakespeare's sonnet CXL-"Be wise as thou art cruel..."

More on sonnets
http://www.poets.org/almanac/index.cfm?45442B782B5F425D047A62414
6580552387E02701E33335A6926574B0B03047501

More on Wordsworth:
http://members.aol.com/wordspage/links.htm

More on Romantic poetry:
http://www.poetry-portal.com/styles6.html

My favorite sonnet sequences:

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/mary.html#Pamphilia

Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/stella.html

The Canzoniere by Petrarch
http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html