Forming the beginning of the romantic era, Wordsworth is known for his poems valuing nature and lamenting the distance of man from the beauty and importance of nature, to which The World Is Too Much With Us (1807) is no exception. Wordsworth's speaker takes on a broad and almost professing nature speaking generally of “us”, which can be easily understood as the contemporary people of his time, and laying claims to their relationship with nature and its costs. As is standard for an English sonnet, it begins with the problem, or in this case the cause: getting, spending and laying waste; then elaborates explaining that this creates a distance from nature, leaving “[them] out of tune”; finally ending with the speakers solution: to return to the old ways. From this it is directly implicit that for an individual living contemporary, the times pull away from nature, leaving them out of perspective for the goings on of the natural world, and if the individual is anything like the speaker it causes them to be lost and forlorn – words that in combination with “the world is too much with us” throw this person into a world of turbulence of goings on in which they are uncontrollably dragged about. This too is then a question of knowing his soul as this person, like the listener from Directive, cannot have wholeness (or identity) if he has given his heart away and is tumbled about in the day to day, the “getting and spending.”

click here for a recording of the poem

The World Is Too Much With Us

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.

Comment on this page