“The world
is too much with us”
Introduction
The poem I
analyse in this paper, “Thr world is too much with us”, is a protest against
the path the society of that moment chose and which has followed from then on
regarding the care of the environment and of nature. Wordsworth tells us that
we have lost our connection with nature and that sometimes it is better to
return to a past stage of civilisation if this allows us to enjoy and to be
more conscious of the importance of nature.
“The
world is too much with us”
1 The world is too much with us; late and soon,
2 Getting and spending, we lay waste our
powers;
3 Little we see in Nature that is ours;
4 We have given our hearts away, a
sordid boon!
5 This Sea that bares her bosom to the
moon,
6 The winds that will be howling at all
hours,
7 And are up-gathered now like sleeping
flowers,
8 For this, for everything, we are out
of tune;
9 It moves us not.--Great God! I'd
rather be
10 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
11 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
12 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
13 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
14 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.1
Prosodic
analysis
This poem has all the characteristics of a
Petrarchan sonnet. This means that its rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. The
poem is composed of an octave and a sestet. In the former we find the problem
that the author poses to the reader and, in the latter, Wordsworth proposes a
solution, as we will see later in the interpretation of the poem.2
The rhyme in the octave is consonant, although
the sestet has two types of rhyme: assonant for the C’s lines and consonant for
the D’s lines. This makes me feel that the octave, where Wordsworth poses the
problem, is quite compact and solid, giving a sense of
completion and strength, having the quality of hardness of the real problem he
is talking about and posing to the reader. The mixture of rhyme type in the sestet
makes the reader feel the fluidity and the varied character of the solution
proposed in it.
Interpretation
of the poem
The poem is centered on the fact that the
mankind started to pollute and destroy the nature since the Industrial
Revolution, although it had started just a few decades ago and they had not
seen its effects enough yet. This already tells us how committed Wordsworth was
to the historical moment he was living, how much he realised that the migration
from the country to the cities was leading to the destruction of nature,
especially because nobody was worrying about whether they were spending too
much or not nor even whether they were doing anything to return what has drawn
from nature.
The first line states the core issue that
vertebrates the whole poem, that mankind is wasting the world and is destroying
it, we are too much for the world, it cannot survive
with us in it. In the following three lines, Wordsworth keeps on talking about
the core issue and introduces the idea that we had the ability to preserve
nature but we are losing it, we disdain it, we cannot see the beauty of nature
and we do not make use of our potential, our “powers” to preserve nature.3
We can see how the first A-A lines have a
final clause which is not a sentence in itself because it has not a verb but
still enclosing a meaning. I think it gives more power to the concept by simply
stating it, showing it, without articulating it, it gives a sense of
completeness and therefore, of bluntness.
Along the lines 5 and 6 William Wordsworth
makes use of anthropomorphism and shows us nature in motion, the author shows a
few examples of nature’s grandeur: the Sea and its immensity, the moon and its
power, the winds and their power. These are examples of what should make a
human being feel amazed when staring at nature and Wordsworth is showing them
to us to make it even clearer if we have not understood the importance and the
greatness of his motives from the very beginning. Then, in the next line, the
poet remarks the fragility of these forces of nature by comparing them with
sleeping flowers, being the flowers a symbol commonly thought as the
prototypical example of weakness despite their beauty, reinforced by the state
of slumber, which reduces one’s defenses to the minimum. And if this was not
enough, the fact that the author makes use of the passive voice makes us feel
that they can be easily controlled by a force external to them.
In the eighth line, Wordsworth repeats what he
had already said in the third line, we are not in tune with nature, and we do
not see ourselves reflected in it. The poet restates the immensity of nature by
telling the reader that there is more to it than what he has said in the poem,
by implicitly saying that “this”, that is, what the author has said in the poem
so far, is not everything.
Despite the fact that the ninth line is part
of the sestet, it serves more as a link between the octave and the sestet. In
the first part, the poet repeats the octave motif: “It moves us not.” Then, he makes
an orthographical break by starting a new sentence and inserting an exclamative
sentence in between, which already announces the reader the central idea of the
solution: God. This materialises the change of theme from the problem posed
from the beginning to the solution starting here. Moreover, this line is the
only one in the whole poem where we can find an enjambment, which adds to the
difference between the rest of the lines and this one.
It is also interesting to point out the fact
that from the ninth line on, the poet starts talking about himself, whereas
Wordsworth has been talking about “us” until now. This makes me think that here
the author states a difference between society (we, us) and he himself, and the
author strengthens this fact by speaking as something as personal and deep as
religion or spirituality, treating it as a choice he would have preferred to
make. Wordsworth presents this as something that cannot be undone by the moment
of writing the poem, perhaps because, among other reasons, Paganism is no
longer a viable choice. (3)
The last four lines express the poet’s desire
to live in a time when religion prepared the mind to appreciate and value nature
and when technology and science were not used in ways that damage the Earth.
There Wordsworth would be able to see things that now nobody can see because of
the differences in religion and beliefs.3
“The world is too much with us” appeared in
This poem he wrote in 1802, along many others
written by him in the early 1800s, shows his critic of the materialism that was
corrupting nature at that time and his poetic powers while moulding his words
to convey his message.4 However, he would start to decline in his
poetry as a result of a change in lifestyle and beliefs around the mid-1810s,
becoming a patriotic and conservative public man, and also because of
Wordsworth’s living on his capital, facilitated by his job as a Distributor of
Stamps of Westmorland in 1813 and his being awarded a civil list pension in
1842, Basil Willey argues.567
Bibliography:
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Close Look at “The World is Too Much with Us” by
William W essays”, Mega Essays LLC. , DMCA, 27 Nov. 2007 <http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/5296.html>
(3) ““The
World is Too Much with Us” Analysis”,
(4)
“William Wordsworth”, Wikipedia. 28 Nov. 2007, Wikimedia Foundation
Inc., 27 Nov. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordsworth#Autobiographical_work_and_Poems_in_Two_Volumes>
(5)
“SparkNotes: Wordsworth’s Poetry: “The world is too much with us” ”, SparkNotes
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(6) “Ode:
On the Intimations of Immortality”, Victorian Web. July 2000, 27 Nov.
2007, <http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/ww/intimations.html>
(7) “William
Wordsworth – Biography and Works”, The
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