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Unit 8: The World is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth—Detailed Study

8.3 Forms and Devices Notes

Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) set forth a manifesto of poetic insight that shook the
nineteenth century poetic establishment. Decrying tradition and classicism for their own sake,
the poet undertook to write poetry “in the real language of men” and to defend his new
techniques as a more authentic response to the world at large.

Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics sought nothing less than the revitalization of poetry
and literature in the lives of common men and women, not just the aristocracy, while at the
same time hoping for a more prestigious place for himself in the arbitration of taste, virtue,
and religion in the public square.

“The World Is Too Much with Us” exemplifies both the proud, buoyant spirit and the dark
undertones of his endeavour. In the poem, Wordsworth simultaneously employs and flaunts
the traditional form as it has come to him. The sonnet serves as a bridge between the arrant
traditionalism in which he was nurtured and the emancipated imagination of a new age, an
age in which “the spontaneous overflow of emotion” would define poetic achievement.
The first eight lines are constructed with the expected metric and rhyme schemes; as readers
arrive at what appears to be a conventional octave-sestet structural split, they are struck by
the abrupt shift in tone, marked by the caesura, and the auspicious launch into rhymed couplets.
The latter device, the equivalent of a “jingle” in twentieth century advertising, jars the reader’s
poetic sensibilities and, further, undermines his or her confidence in interpreting the poem
aright at first glance.
These conventions broken, the poet proceeds to navigate new thematic territory as well. Faithful
to his self-confessed predilections for “common language,” the diction of the sonnet is unpretentious,
if graphically sensuous. The poet’s ploy of depicting the pre-Christian worldview as a nursing
mother to be suckled surely shocked its original audience. This rather indelicate juxtaposition
of “Pagan creed” and, by implication, “Mother Church” foregrounds Wordsworth’s—and,
more commonly, the Romantics’—disdain for organized religion and what he regarded as its
untoward effect upon the appreciation of nature as a source of spiritual enlightenment.

8.4 Themes and Meanings

This sonnet comprises an apt summary of many of the themes Wordsworth pursued throughout
his tumultuous career. Primarily, “The World Is Too Much with Us” is a poem about vision,
about lines of sight, about the debris of history that prevents the observer from seeing through
to the real meaning and purpose of human life.
Throughout the first eight lines of the sonnet, two competing worldviews are silently compared
before the poet explicitly declares in line 9 his allegiance to a modified Paganism that preserves
nature’s autonomy and authority apart from human control or divine manipulation. In short,
the poet seeks to divorce Christian vice from Pagan virtue and form a hybrid ethic that
permits the soul to return to its spiritual moorings.
The poet’s intellectual vista envisions a decadent West poised on utter industrialization and
eventually ruin. The incipient “environmentalism” found in the sonnet undergirds most of
Wordsworth’s other works, especially his long narrative poem, The Prelude (published posthumously
in 1850), and his verse drama, The Borderers (1842). Nature is conceptualized as a willing
teacher, a personified, secularized “Holy Spirit,” who will “guide us into all truth.”
The “world” that is “too much with us” is the world as stylized, fixed, unmalleable—the
world of a sovereign deity who has placed humankind in a cosmos of his and not their
making. Echoed here, then, is the poet’s rebellion against this fixedness. The sonnet is thus a

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