The World is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth - Summary
The poem "The World Is Too Much With Us" is written by William Wordsworth, the leading literary figure of the Romantic Era in Britain. It was published in a collection titled Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The poem laments the negative implications of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It is structured as a petrarchan sonnet, having the rhyme scheme: abba cdecde.
Wordsworth complains about the human beings' transition from being a unique and social creature to a mechanical and materialistic one. He grieves that human beings now no longer enjoy the Nature which gives us a everlasting joy and serene atmosphere. People have become gross and machine-like in their thought process. For saving himself from such a "disease", Wordsworth takes refuge in Nature and imagination and find utmost respite.
According to the poet, we human beings, are fed up with our natural surroundings. We forget to live fruitfully and without purpose. We are wasting our energies and potential on irrelevant things. We don't observe the nature and its beauty. Like a mechanical object, we renounced our heart, our emotional side and the very thing which makes us human beings. The act of becoming a heartless being which we cherish as a "sordid boon" is actually disastrous, notable here is the paradoxical phrase.
According to the poet, we human beings, are fed up with our natural surroundings. We forget to live fruitfully and without purpose. We are wasting our energies and potential on irrelevant things. We don't observe the nature and its beauty. Like a mechanical object, we renounced our heart, our emotional side and the very thing which makes us human beings. The act of becoming a heartless being which we cherish as a "sordid boon" is actually disastrous, notable here is the paradoxical phrase.
We ignore the beauty of the view of sea under the moonlight. Here the poet personifies sea and the moon, the sea is personified as a female who is seduced by her lover, the Moon. The fast blowing winds that create a howling-like sound at all hours are silent now as they are sleeping. All these simple yet calm natural processes are being ignored by us, that's why we are "out of tune".
It depresses the poet that we are not moved by these little, beautiful things and he wished to God that he would like to be a follower of an obsolete-principled religion than being a soulless and mechanical human.
It depresses the poet that we are not moved by these little, beautiful things and he wished to God that he would like to be a follower of an obsolete-principled religion than being a soulless and mechanical human.
So the poet stands on a pleasant land and uses his imagination to mitigate his grief and have sight of a Greek mythological minor sea god named Proteus who possessed the knowledge of all things, rising from the sea or hear the sound of "wreathed horn" blown by another sea god, Triton. It was believed that Triton had the power to control sea waves by his conch shells.