ABSTRACT
As Saree Makdisi writes, Wordsworth here feels “the terror of the dissolution of maps, boundaries, categories, and spaces - of subjectivity itself” (36). After this image of “blank confusion,” “a type not false/ Of what the mighty City is itself,” (124: VII: 695-96), he gets out of London as fast as he can; his boyish dreams have turned into a vision of horror. He is beginning to realize that the Whittington story is the wrong story for him, and that he can penetrate to the center of the English poetic canon while living in a distant countryside, in Somerset or Grasmere. It is true that Wordsworth did not entirely lose his awed sense of London’s “weight and power,” as is shown by his 1802 sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge.” But the city he conjures up in that sonnet is sleeping and silent, and there are no magical bells to summon him back there.
