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LINES 6-7 silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; Lines 5, 6, and 7 assign more unexpected characteristics to the city while varying the imagery. They also call attention to the poem’s central theme of nature vs. civilization. After the semicolon caesura in line 5, the words “silent” and “bare” appear. Before dipping down into line 6, however, it’s not entirely clear what these words describe. They eventually modify the list of buildings, but at this point they could just as well modify “This City” or “The beauty of the morning” (from a less technical perspective, they do describe those things, since the buildings are part of the city and the morning’s beauty). What is clear, however, is that the reader has seen these words before, but probably not in this context. Like “fair” and “touching,” “silent” and “bare” are unexpected choices for describing a city, especially London in the thick of the Industrial Revolution. The speaker introduces a fresh vision of the typically smoggy city, but the poem contains an implicit warning: like the fleeting dawn, this urban beauty will not last. Line 6 then presents a list of buildings. In the morning sunlight, the speaker sees “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples,” a carefully selected variety. The ships might represent commerce, the towers government, the domes architectural skill, the theatres art, and the temples religion. These imply a rich variety of human activity, not to mention a dizzying number of humans. Though “silent” and “bare” at the moment, then, these buildings will soon erupt in a frenzy of noise and activity, very much awake. These buildings, however, don’t exist solely for their human occupants. They seem also to possess an inexpressible connection with the natural world, and as such “lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky.” The buildings’ openness suggests a fluidity between them and the fields, which, though they may be agricultural, are a gradual step toward “pure” nature. As for the sky, the buildings could either be reaching for it, or dissolving into it. The speaker does not say, choosing instead to offer that the city and nature may be one and the same (they are certainly both part of Earth). In line 7, the punctuation and meter emphasize the fields and the sun, those seemingly infinite horizons: Open unto the fifields, and to the sky; Both words are stressed, causing the line to begin (indeed, to "open") with a trochee (two in a row, in fact), before falling back into the expected iambic rhythm. The caesura here also pushes the reader to linger over “fields,” while the semicolon’s end-stop prompts a second look at “sky.” This end-stopped line is also the first of three total end-stopped lines to use a semicolon. This signals that the speaker is not totally through with creating an image of the city, just taking a final breath before summing it up.