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The World Is Too Much With Us Analysis

The speaker criticizes modern society for being too focused on material goods and losing its connection to nature. He observes humanity ignoring the beauty of storms over the sea. The speaker wishes he was raised pagan so he could find spiritual comfort in seeing ancient gods rising from the waves, showing how far removed his time was from the ideal communion with nature. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet that angrily expresses Wordsworth's theme of the importance of connecting with nature.

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The World Is Too Much With Us Analysis

The speaker criticizes modern society for being too focused on material goods and losing its connection to nature. He observes humanity ignoring the beauty of storms over the sea. The speaker wishes he was raised pagan so he could find spiritual comfort in seeing ancient gods rising from the waves, showing how far removed his time was from the ideal communion with nature. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet that angrily expresses Wordsworth's theme of the importance of connecting with nature.

Uploaded by

uberuber12
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The World Is Too Much With Us analysis Summary 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). The rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is somewhat variable; in this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD. In most Petrarchan sonnets, the octave proposes a question or an idea that the sestet answers, comments upon, or criticizes. Commentary 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 problemhe 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 wishin Christian England, one did not often wish to be a pagan. 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 Wordsworths 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 canonnotably London, 1802,in which the speaker dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.

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