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:

MORNING. The poem repeatedly calls attention to the fact that it’s morning to depict a waking city that, though quiet and beautiful at dawn, will quickly recede into the smoke and noise of industry. The fleeting dawn represents impermanent beauty, and as the poem develops the speaker gains a greater appreciation for that impermanence. Line 5 is the first to actually state that it’s morning, but once the reader knows this, the preceding lines take on a different color. If it’s morning, that means the speaker, who is standing on Westminster Bridge, is watching the sun rise over London, a moment that will not last. In the first description of morning, the city wears the sunlight “like a garment.” In that sunlight, all the buildings are “silent” and “bare.” There is silence and pureness to the first moments of the morning, just as there might be in the sliver of a moment before a human wakes up. In line 8, the city is summed up as “bright and glittering in the smokeless air.” The buildings appear this way because of the morning sunlight, but that sunlight, the line implies, will soon be blocked by smoke. Later, in line 9, the morning sunlight grows more intense. The brief dawn has passed, and the sun “steep[s]” the city in a rich light, as if filling it with the energy it needs to start the day. There is “splendour” in this moment, says the speaker, but soon, thanks to the human activity it powers, that splendor will subside. Finally, in lines 13 and 14, the poem returns to the image of waking: the “houses seem asleep” and the “heart is lying still.” But the city is not, in fact, asleep—or if it is, it won’t be for long. The poem’s exclamatory end reminds readers that this state of inactivity, like the morning, will soon end, bringing with it a total transformation of the city and the individual’s experience of it. Where this symbol appears in the poem: • Lines 4-5: “This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning;” • Line 8: “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.” • Lines 9-10: “Never did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;” • Lines 13-14: “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”