Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

LINES 2-3 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: Lines 2 and 3 further emphasize the speaker’s subjecti vity—that is, they present the speaker as an individual human, someone with a unique perspective and debatable opinions—by charging the speaker’s claim with spiritual significance. The lines also introduce one of the poem’s central questions about the urban setting. If line 1 is a debatable opinion, line 2 is a harsh judgment. The person who could pass by the still unspecified “sight” must be “Dull...of soul,” says the speaker. Whereas he or she appreciates the spiritually “touching” view of the city, the man on the streethardly notices it. Why? Because his soul lacks vitality. In expressing an opinion at all, however, the speaker places himor herself among the city-dwellers, each one of them with opinions and prejudices of his or her own. This line also contains internal rhyme—“Dull” with “soul”—which is also an example of slant rhyme. The rhyme lends harshness to the judgment. And, in the line’s irregular meter, the words are stressed, doubling the rhyme’s emphasis. The judgment isn’t a cheap, personal attack, however. It may, instead, be an implicit critique of industrial urban life, one of hard labor and dulling routine. In an example of situational irony, the speaker suggests, the man on the street walks by the soothing view of the city without lifting his head precisely because life in that city is so soul-sucking. With the minor character of the passerby, the poem raises one of its central questions: how can a place full of so much ugliness and pain be so beautiful? Line 3 prepares the reader for the revelation of that beauty. It indicates that the thing in question is a “sight,” and adds to “fair” two more unexpected words: “touching” and “majesty.” Like line 1, line 3 is end-stoppedwith a colon. This second end-stopped line establishes a pattern (most of the lines in the poem are end-stopped), and the colon in particular signals the grand reveal of the “sight,” the view from the bridge.