I enjoy asking students to define what poetry is, because each class comes up with a different definition, and each one is correct. It is the nebulous nature of poetry that most attracts me (well, that -- and the fact that it's shorter than a novel) because a poem can take any form, use language either in strange or in predictable ways, employ punctuation for effect or eschew it altogether; and sometimes the white space on the page can be as important as the ink. Better than a crossword. More uplifting than a newspaper article. Truer than your horoscope. Political, raw, and often a punch to the stomach.

If, however, you need a quick definition for your homework assignment or are interested in browsing through some of the best poems in English, visit Poets.org (or just about any of the .org sites on the topic). [Don't, under any circumstances, visit a .com site and expect to see anything other than crass exploitation of the severely ungifted -- I've had to disillusion students on more than one occasion when informed that their poems have been accepted for publication online. The .com sites would accept a poem written by my cat.] The very existence of these sites, however, serves to illustrate the enduring attraction of poetry and its importance in our lives. For some reason, we need poetry. It is vital because it satisfies some need we have to be lifted outside of ourselves and into the realm of a different kind of consciousness.

I like James Dickey's definition. Poetry, he said (only he pronounced it "poeh-treh"), is the right word next to the right word. Sounds easy enough. Just pick up the dictionary, shake out a few words, and put them in the right order. e e cummings might have worked that way, but once you start, you realize how devilishly difficult it is. Which word is the right one? Brazen, or bold? Tawny or tan? Charlie Smith maintains that there are certain words ya just don't use anymore -- words such as "brook" or contractions such as "e'er" -- and he's correct, of course, in the assertion that poetry has changed as a genre since the Romantic Age, when unstrangled lyricism gushed free. Teenagers used to delve into the verbiage of Romanticism as a way to unlock the secrets of their souls. Oh boy, don't we wish that was one key they hadn't turned (and I add my own teenage rush of bad poetry in that indictment). Now? Hmmm, I'm not so sure what passes for teenage angst-speak these days. Perhaps txt msgs? "ur gr8 i luv u."

Speaking of words, however, let's look at a poem by Wordsworth, who was surely the "safest" Romantic poet of the lot -- all those clouds and hills and solitary farm girls -- there couldn't be many rabbit punches in his work, could there? Wordsworth blended his themes into the landscape of England itself, setting the Romantic bar high for such descriptive profusion (and a lot of daffodils). Lyricism at its most lyrical? Devoid of political or social commentary, no matter how unconsciously presented? Let's see:

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.

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!

What a boring title for a poem. It isn't even a title, is it? Just a description of where he was when he wrote it. Unless. . . There's a pun, there, isn't there? "Composed" works in both senses; this is a poem about a tranquil moment, so both the poet and the scene are calm and composed. As for the place -- you can't get much more central in London than on a bridge over the River Thames. And Westminster is the location of both the Houses of Parliament and the great abbey; Church and State both accounted for, then. This begins to be less boring, and more incisive. Why does he give us the date? Did something important happen on September 3, 1802? Or did something important not happen that day? Or is he just being precise? Since this is hardly a diary entry, we have to assume there is some significance. The Treaty of Amiens was signed in 1802, bringing a truce to the consistantly strained relations between England and France, who had been at war for over a decade. So England is now at peace (if precariously), and this is reflected in the poem.

-- now for the poem. This is a sonnet. It's a very particular form of poetry that relies heavily on an exact pattern of words so that some lines rhyme and all lines have ten syllables. It's a neat, compact form for a poem, one you can easily carry in your pocket or handbag -- and it's packed as tightly as a soldier's footlocker. Never be fooled by the relatively few lines in a sonnet (14) -- the poet's task here is to be concise, not simplistic.

The placement of any given word within the line is significant. The first word here is "Earth" -- the planet -- and for someone writing in 1802, imagining what the globe would look like in outer space, relative to the other planets in our little solar system, is purely speculative. We are used to shots of Earth taken from our Moon or from the Shuttle; we know what Earth looks like. Wordsworth's first word, however, is a considerable size. And when you say it aloud, you notice that all the stress of the line is loaded onto that first word: "EARTH has not anything to show more fair." Emphasis on the word puts emphasis on the meaning, of course, and while we might argue with Wordsworth's assertion here (I can think of plenty of sights I'd rather look at from Space), we can also notice that he chooses to say "not anything" instead of "nothing." The whole of the planet, then, is lacking -- compared to this spot on the globe. Hmmm. Boast much? (as Buffy would say).

We often ask ourselves and each other, after any project or endeavour that may have gone awry, "And what do you have to show for it?" Earth, apparently, after all its endeavouring to become the third rock from the Sun, has London to show for it, as the accumulation and crowning achievement of a job well done. Let's consider this for a moment, in its proper context. London, in 1802, was the financial capital of the World. London financed the finest shipping lines, insured their hulls and cargoes, and sent fleets to the Orient and back, accounting for every penny of their worth. London invested in the New World as well as the Old, and speculated in futures.

But that can't be what Wordsworth is getting at, can it? Does he mean literal physical beauty? ("not anything. . . more fair"). We'll get to that in a moment, but let's continue developing the idea of what London would have represented for any working stiff at that particular moment in history. The British Empire was at its height of power, and the British Navy could assert truthfully that "Britannia" ruled the waves. London housed the monarchy, the military, the finances, and the whole might of the Empire. England certainly did have a lot to show for its overseas exploitation and global marketeering. Women wore silks from China and cooks added spices to the stew. Paisley patterns from India became fashionable. Walking in the upper class areas of London must have been a fair sight, indeed, with gleaming horses and burnished carriages, feathers and finery, abundance and plenitude. I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

So London, both as a physical place and as representing the might of empire, should really be in the mind of anyone contemplating the scene from Westminster Bridge in 1802, or contemplating the poem as a reader. Poems are deliberate, not accidental. Wordsworth has chosen to contemplate the sight and its implications are not lost on him -- the sonnet becomes a lens through which to focus attention on the literal and figurative meanings -- we can't decide to ignore any of the implications, as reading poetry is an exercise of the mind, not a passive experience.

As in the first line, the second holds main emphasis on the first word: dull.  Great word; means boring, or unsharpened, blunted, not bright, not shining, not glistening -- DULL.  Anyone who could pass by this scene and not be taken with it (since, after all, earth has not anything to show more fair) would be dumb, unpolished, not lively, listless, sluggish, colorless, insipid, tedious, uninteresting, slow, obtuse, STUPID.  "Dull," in fact, is a really loaded word.  And to be accused of having a dull soul -- well, condemnation indeed.  "Soul" itself is loaded, too -- Wordsworth combines the Romantic notion of the soul being an ephemeral prism through which experience shines richly on the "inward eye" -- the cinemascope of the mind -- with the more traditional concept of the soul in any religious sense.  In short, your whole being, your very existence, would be a veritable blob of lifeless goo if you were not taken with the view from Westminster Bridge (remember, this was before that dreadful Ferris Wheel was erected). 

Touching? The Romantic sensibility is founded on the emotional impact of everything it encounters. Thus Wordsworth really is somehow physically moved by sight and sounds around him -- his poems, he famously explained, contained "emotion recollected in tranquility" and were designed to counterfeit a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (like Chopin's Impromptus, of course, the pretense of spontaneity is a carefully crafted façade). But in order to be the poet one must first be able to see the power and majesty in any given scene; in order to relate the the incident one must witness its splendour. So far, in this sonnet, Wordsworth hasn't given us anything: no description of what is actually there; he has just told us that it is so amazing we'd have to be blethering eejits not to be wowed and awed by the scene. "Majesty" is another interesting word, too; it has obvious connotations with monarchy and the regal nature of the splendid view from the bridge. Ok, W.W. -- we get it, it's fab: but are you ever going to tell us what IT is?  And yes, in fact, this line ends with a colon: that handy symbol that shows us an explanation and description are on their way.  About time.

Now we're getting somewhere! From the bridge, he can see the whole city of London reaching far out into the countryside. This city, personified, wears the beauty of the morning. Oh, Wordsworth, you rogue: you've contrasted the words "garment" and "bare"; how daring. Again, in order to get the full impression of such a scene, we have to remember that the beauty of a London morning in 1802 would be very early indeed; before people lit fires and started chimneys smoking, started factories churning out grey from smoke stacks, started trains and engines belching out steam and smoke from every orifice. Silent. As in, before the machines start. Bare. As in, before wreaths of smoke are draped over the city (instead of the beauty of the morning). London, being the main railway hub of the country and a mail port, found it comparatively cost efficient to transport goods from elsewhere rather than around the city itself; however, the city was teeming with small workshops, and larger enterprises included the breweries (of course -- in some cases it was safer to drink beer than the local water), armaments manufacturing, and (of all things) pianos (see Ball, Michael, and David Sunderland. An Economic History of London 1800-1914. London: Routledge, 2001. 17. I mention the text because the authors helpfully explain that pianos were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the television).

All that industry used power and the power came from steam produced by burning fossil fuels. Once the whole city was up and running for the day, the amount of smoke billowing up into the sky would have been much more than we are used to -- or have probably ever seen. Such smoke leaves a residue of soot and grime on buildings, on streets, on people.

So yes; very early in the morning. . .

How do you sum up a city as complex as London in a few words? If I were to say "canal, gondola, piazza, church" you'd immediately guess Venice. London in 1802? Ships (ships, and more ships). Towers (Big Ben, for starters). Domes (St. Paul's Cathedral). Theatres (always!). Temples (Westminster Abbey is right there, remember). The trappings of London are more than the smoke that will fill the sky later in the day. The history of the river and the port alone are astounding; add to that the Inns of Court, Westminster, the staggeringly moving cathedral, the abbey where monarchs are crowned, married, and mourned; the theatres -- good grief; I was almost overwhemled just a line earlier with the idea that the city in 1802 was encroached on and begrimed by industry; now I'm faced with a list of the key landmarks of London in procession, and in the startlingly threadbare simplicity of a mere list. How un-Romantic in strategy, to list items of note as if preparing to compile a Baedeker's Guide. And yet, the words themselves sound regal in this setting (how has Wordsworth managed it?); the plural "s" sounds add a stately tone and effectively slow down your reading of the line (try reading it aloud as a list of singular nouns, then plural. Hear the difference?) so that you treat each word with the respect it deserves.

And (oh, irony of ironies) WW, that purveyor of the beauty of nature in all her finery, also manages to set all this stately progress into Shakespeare's precious stone, set in a silver sea -- ("this scepter'd isle,/ This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,/ This other Eden, demi-paradise,/ This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection and the hand of war,/ This happy breed of men, this little world" Richard II, 2.1) -- and he does this just by setting London "Open unto the fields, and to the sky"; the city itself is the jewel in the greensward. He's waxing lyrical without BEING lyrical -- the simplicity of the presentation (required by the sonnet form, making the poet pack the meaning in tightly with no room for ornamentation at all) makes London itself the ornamentation.

Ha!  We're ready for this line now, aren't we? London: all bright and glittering. Not dull, as in line two; and the air is smokeless. Know that early morning sunlight, as it slants in just above the horizon and glints off windows and water? That kind of light. The word "smokeless" of course implies its opposite. Smoke will cover this and fill the scene. But for now, dame London wears the early morning like a damsel's silk charmeuse bridal chemise.

William Wordsworth, in case you weren't aware of this, always liked to include weather reports in his poems.  This isn't as silly as it sounds (although it sounded silly in the student paper which stated that WW started his poetry with weather forecasts); for someone who focused his attention out into the countryside, weather was a part of the scenery (and have you ever been to the British Isles?  There is a reason they are all fixated on meteorological phenomena.  There is a lot of weather in the UK; in fact, they get more than their fair share, always having changeable weather patterns and storm systems to engross their attention.  Come to think of it, it was probably more visually stimulating than watching the piano. . . .

Anyway, here is the weather report.  But the sun is in on the act, outdoing the shining business on this particular morning -- and the inference is that London looks more beautiful in this light than any natural scene at such a moment.  This is quite a statement, coming from WW, as his preference was roundly on the rural over the suburban. 

Calm. Not a word usually associated with London. A surprising word. I'm not sure we can imagine how noisy London would have been in 1802.  Horses, dogs, people, chickens, blacksmiths, all those pianos, shipbuilding, potters, street hawkers, metal workers, brick makers, tanners -- noisome, as well as noisy.  To see the city in such a moment of profound calm is rare indeed.

Nah, this poem does not pack a rabbit punch.  It performs open-heart surgery.  On England.  If London is the heart of the country, and it is open to the sky in this most naked and vulnerable moment, then WW has managed to uncover for us (or the morning has managed to uncover for him -- since it's his reaction to the scene we're witnessing) the very heartbeat of the nation.  And not a daffodil in sight.