Interest in building a bridge between Clifton and Leigh Woods gained currency in the C18th as more and more wealthy merchants moved to the area, thus making it more prosperous. Plans and investments, which had begun in 1753, were stalled firstly by the French Revolutionary Wars and their impact on trade, and secondly - after Brunel had won the project engineer contract - by the outbreak of the Bristol Riots in 1831. Works resumed in 1836 and, after numerous further setbacks, the bridge was finally completed in 1864.

It was in 1836, however, that William Lisle Bowles composed his sonnet 'The Bridge Between Clifton and Leigh Woods':

Frown ever opposite, the angel cried,
  Who, with an earthquake's might and giant hand,
  Severed these riven rocks, and bade them stand
Severed for ever! The vast ocean-tide,
  Leaving its roar without at his command,
  Shrank, and beneath the woods through the green land
Went gently murmuring on, so to deride
The frowning barriers that its force defied!
  But Art, high o'er the trailing smoke below
Of sea-bound steamer, on yon summit's head
  Sat musing; and where scarce a wandering crow
Sailed o'er the chasm, in thought a highway led;
  Conquering, as by an arrow from a bow,
The scene's lone Genius by her elfin-thread.

 

As with Bowles' other poems, the feelings which drive the elegaic sonnet are rooted in the physicalities of the picturesque landscape or, as he explains in the expanded edition of his Sonnets, 'the unity of sentiment...naturally flowing...in spots of time'. Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and other early Romantics admired Bowles' sonnets. Coleridge praised the association between natural objects and the emotions they inspired, and the nostalgic connection between place and private thought, which charaterises much of Bowles' verse. Bowles' poem addressing the landscape of his youth 'To the River Itchin' provided the model for Coleridge's 'To the Rver Otter' (1796). Years later, in 1817, Coleridge recalls the influence of the poet in Biographia Literaria: 'My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, ... I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. Poetry ... became insipid to me.... This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education.... But from this I was auspiciously withdrawn, ... chiefly ... by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets &c. of Mr. Bowles!'