Composed upon Westminster Bridge

This sonnet was printed in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, with the date September 3, 1803, in its title. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal places the crossing of the bridge on July 31, 1802, so the printed date is disputed. The 1807 text keeps the older spelling shew, which modern reprints usually change.

Where this text comes fromIn the 1807 volume this sonnet is simply number 14, printed without any of the reverence later editions give it, and two of its spellings have not survived into modern reprints. It has shew where we would write show, and in it’s majesty with an apostrophe, which in 1807 was an ordinary way of writing the possessive rather than the mistake it looks like now. The copy linked here keeps both. You are typing the first eight lines, stopping where the sonnet turns from the view to the poet standing in it.

What you might not noticeThe first line prints any thing as two separate words, which was normal in 1807 and is now flagged as an error by every spellchecker. You type the space regardless. Source

What it trainsEleven commas in 459 characters, four of them in one line: Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples. Dense for a single line, though not a record, and five other passages here carry more of them overall. Lists like that are where accuracy quietly drops, because the hand starts moving to a rhythm and stops reading. Two archaic spellings will fight your fingers if you know English well: shew, which the head corrects to show, and it’s used as a possessive, which every instinct wants to type as its. Thirteen capitals, nine of them opening verse lines rather than sentences.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource