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Unit 16: The World is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth

environment will proceed unchecked and relentless like the “winds that will be howling at all Notes
hours”.

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
1. Wordsworth was the Romantic poet.
2. ‘‘The world is to much with us’’ was published in 1802 in two volumes.
3. The words ‘late and soon’ describes present.

16.3 Critical Appreciation of ‘The World is too Much with Us’

Poet’s Anger

The world is too much with us” falls in line with a number of sonnets written by Wordsworth
in the early 1800s that criticize or admonish what Wordsworth saw as the decadent material
cynicism of the time. 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—in Christian England, one did not often
wish to be a pagan.

Theme

On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry summation of the familiar Wordsworthian theme of
communion with nature, and states precisely how far the early nineteenth century was from
living out the Wordsworthian ideal. The sonnet is important for its rhetorical force (it shows
Wordsworth’s increasing confidence with language as an implement of dramatic power, sweeping
the wind and the sea up like flowers in a bouquet), and for being representative of other
poems in the Wordsworth canon—notably “London, 1802,” in which the speaker dreams of
bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.

Angrily, the speaker accuses the modern age of having lost its connection to nature and to
everything meaningful: “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!” He says that even when
the sea “bares her bosom to the moon” and the winds howl, humanity is still out of tune, and
looks on uncaringly at the spectacle of the storm. The speaker wishes that he were a pagan
raised according to a different vision of the world, so that, “standing on this pleasant lea,” he
might see images of ancient gods rising from the waves, a sight that would cheer him greatly.
He imagines “Proteus rising from the sea,” and Triton “blowing his wreathed horn.”

Form

This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets
are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of
sonnets; “The world is too much with us” takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after
the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided
into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines).

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