London, Wordsworth and Blake

click photos to enlarge
I can't pass Westminster Bridge in London without thinking of Wordsworth's sonnet. "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802" is a poem in which the great Romantic applies the language and evokes the emotions more usually associated with his works about nature, particularly his beloved Lake District. In this piece Wordsworth describes the view from the bridge in the morning, and he speaks favourably of all that London has to offer the eye, the spirit and the mind. It is not what lovers of Wordsworth would expect to fall from his pen.

William Blake's vision of the city in his poem, "London", as a place of dirt and despair might seem to be more in tune with Wordsworth's outlook, but the Romantic's eye spots the beauty that exists alongside the grime where Blake sees only horrors. What would both men have made of the city today I wonder? People have sometimes asked me if I could live in London, and my answer has always been the same - yes, I'd love to for three or four years, but not for a lifetime. I think that in that period I could take from it in one long draught that which I currently experience in sips.

I recently spent some time around Westminster Bridge and today post a couple of the shots I took. The first shows the view upstream, and is a scene that is not as frequently photographed as the one downstream. Out of view, to the right are the Houses of Parliament. I took the shot for the foreground of the bridge parapet with the people (especially the tourist in red taking a photograph) against the background buildings and clouds. Millbank Tower on the right is an abomination that should never have been built, and the flats with the bizarre tops in the centre look better only when you're very close to them, so it was the colours and light as much as the details that appealed to me about this one.

The second shot shows the Houses of Parliament (properly called the Palace of Westminster) with the low sun about to set behind its prickly outline. There's no denying the distinctiveness of Barry and Pugin's Gothicised spires and towers, and the romantic way they pierce the sky. In this light Westminster Bridge can just be discerned, and I was grateful for the passing bus and gull on the left which helped the compositional balance. Though it is the opposite end of the day to when Wordsworth was on the bridge, and the Parliament buildings weren't yet built, this view offers the eye something of the qualities that must have led him to sing the city's praises.

photographs & text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1 (Photo 2)
Camera: Lumix LX3 (Olympus E510)
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm : 60mm/35mm equiv. (22mm : 106mm/44mm equiv.)
F No: f4 (f5.6)
Shutter Speed: 1/320 (1/1250)
ISO: 80 (100)
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV (-0.3 EV)
Image Stabilisation: On

Picturesque Derwent Water

click photo to enlarge

No one in the seventeenth century would have felt that a hot sunny day was best enjoyed outdoors. Nor would they have surveyed Derwent Water and its surrounding hills and mountains of the Lake District and described the scene as beautiful. In those times the heat of the sun was to be avoided. Charles II, who was raised in France (and so knew the heat of a continental summer) said that "he liked...that country best, which might be enjoyed the most hours of the day, and the most days of the year, which he was sure was to be done in England more than in any country whatsoever." Rugged landscape in the seventeenth century was "the blasted heath", "the waste", a place to be avoided, and not to be compared with the beauty of the cultivated lowlands.

The eighteenth century continued to hold the same views about hot sunshine, but, slowly the attitude towards mountainous and wild landscape changed. Anthony Ashley Cooper, John Dennis and Joseph Addison wrote about the agreeable, fearful pleasures that arose in crossing the Alps. Edmund Burke's philosophy took up this theme. The rise of the Picturesque was part of Romanticism's reaction against the quickening pace of science's uncovering of the mysteries of the natural world, and it gave a more formal structure to this way of looking at the world. It viewed the emotions stirred by untamed nature as instinctive, sublime, worthy, and as something to be actively sought. Writers, musicians and the visual arts fed on these new sensibilities. Highly influential was Thomas Gilpin's, "Observations of the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770", published in 1782. It urged people to stop dismissing the rugged landscape of the British Isles, and admire it according to the ideals he proposed. The ripples from Gilpin and the Picturesque spread through English painting, landscape gardening, poetry, and out into Europe and the United States.

Had he been born a hundred years earlier William Wordsworth would never have sat by the waterfall above Derwent Water and listened to the "roar that stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodor", or thought of moving to live at Grasmere, still less sought his inspiration in Lakeland's crags and peaks, or spent his last years at Rydal Mount. It was writers like Wordsworth and his friend, Coleridge, and painters like Richard Wilson, Cozens (father and son) and Francis Towne who also deserve our thanks for opening our eyes to the beauties of scenes like that shown in today's photograph.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On