One morning, going over Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth has a shocking realization: London is actually way prettier than he had ever noticed before. (Maybe it had something to do with the fact that no one was awake yet? People can be noisy and annoying.)
How does Wordsworth draw on ideas about nature and the city in "Composed upon Westminster Bridge"? We think about these places as totally opposed—but do they have to be? What does this poem have to say about it? These are all questions that the New Critics were into answering via a close reading of the text.
This sonnet also packs in a lot of imagery. How does Wordsworth use the words "bare" and "silent," in particular? Can you find different ways of reading these descriptions? (Imagine you're William Empson writing Seven Types of Ambiguity, and have a literary ball, friends.)