Morality In William Wordsworth's London, 1802

In William Wordsworth’s “London, 1802,” the poet John Milton metonymically symbolizes the artistic excellence and revolutionary vigor the speaker believes England has lost. However, the speaker also appeals to Milton for moral guidance, correlating England’s political and cultural stagnation to a forgotten moral foundation. While the speaker employs parallelism and a wide variety of poetic devices to demonstrate this causality, his conspicuous and incessant use of the colon and semicolon particularly establish this interconnectedness. For example, the speaker uses the semicolon to parallel freedom and power with manners and virtue. Moreover, he uses the colon to correlate Milton’s soul– the moral centre of the self– with his influential voice …show more content…
Here, “freedom” and “power” carry political and artistic connotations; while the speaker may refer to the political freedom Milton supported during and after the Civil War, he may also refer to the freedom and agency of self one obtains from artistic expression. Nonetheless, the way in which the speaker clusters manners and virtue with freedom and power implies that manners– the most basic form of morality– is the origin of liberty. Moreover, the serialization of these ideals also suggests a causal relationship, whereupon politeness is also the impetus of virtue, freedom, and power. The semicolon at the end of line seven enhances this causality, as it equates these moral foundations with Milton and his political and cultural legacies. In addition, the speaker’s statement “We are selfish men” (6) further demonstrates his preoccupation with England’s moral devolution. The connection between manners and Milton’s freedom and power in turn exemplifies how the speaker uses the semicolon to establish a causal relationship between morality and artistic and political