The World is Too Much
With Us
by William Wordsworth
The world is too much
with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in
Nature that is ours;
We have given our
hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares
her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will
be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered
now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for
everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us
not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a
creed outworn;
So might I, standing
on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that
would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus
rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton
blow his wreathèd horn.
CRITICISM
CRITICISM
"The world
is too much with us" is a sonnet with an abbaabbacdcdcd rhyme scheme. This
relatively simple poem angrily states that human beings are too preoccupied
with the material (“The world...getting and spending”) and have lost touch with
the spiritual and with nature. In the sestet, the speaker dramatically proposes
an impossible personal solution to his problem—he wishes he could have been
raised as a pagan, so he could still see ancient gods in the actions of nature
and thereby gain spiritual solace. His thunderous “Great God!” indicates the
extremity of his wish.
The poem is
written from a place of angst and frustration. All around, people are obsessed
with money and with manmade objects. These people are losing their powers of
divinity, and can no longer identify with the natural world. This idea is
encapsulated in the famous lines: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our
powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours." Wordsworth believes that
we have given our hearts away in exchange for money and material wealth. He is
disgusted at this especially because nature is so readily available; it almost
calls to humanity. In the end, Wordsworth decides that he would rather be a
pagan in a complete state of disillusionment than be out of touch with nature.
The final image
of the poem is of Wordsworth standing on a lea (or a tract of open land)
overlooking the ocean where he sees Proteus and Triton. He is happy, but this
happiness is not what the reader is meant to feel. In actuality, the reader should
feel saddened by the scene, because Wordsworth has given up on humanity,
choosing instead to slip out of reality.
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