Daunting, inspiring, comforting, terrifying: the writers who can make silence as eloquent as words

2026-03-26 - 14:40

From the hush of medieval lullabies to striking poems about Grenfell, great authors know how to deploy the power of silence On a snowy Sunday morning in February 1808, the poet William Wordsworth was walking along Fleet Street in London. He’d just been to visit his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lodgings on the Strand. Coleridge was at a low ebb: stuck in an unhappy marriage, weighed down by perennial financial difficulties, mentally blocked from writing, in poor health and addicted to opium. The visit had a lowering effect on Wordsworth’s own spirits. Walking along Fleet Street, eyes downcast, “ear sleeping”, feet moving automatically, he was absorbed in sombre thoughts. But then something made him look up. A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, “silent, empty, pure white”, and, at the end of it, the “huge and majestic form” of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes – a real-life snow globe. “I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought-of sight,” Wordsworth told his friend and patron, Sir George Beaumont, in a letter he wrote a few days later. “What a blessing I feel there is in habits of exalted imagination.” The great London silence was another piece in his accumulating pile of evidence that intuiting something beyond yourself is the route to becoming morally magnificent. Continue reading...