Summary and Analysis of The World Is Too Much With Us

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Talking about poem, so, a poem is a collection of spoken or written words that expresses ideas or emotions in a powerfully vivid and imaginative style. There are a lot of prominent poets that had created so many beautiful poems that has amazing meaning. This edition, we are going to analyze a poem entitled “The World Is Too Much With Us” by Wordsword. Without doing further do, let’s check it out below!!

The World Is Too Much With Us

BY 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.

The major themes of the poem are the loss of nature and the natural world and the impacts of the busy life. The poet argues that people have forsaken their souls for material gains. In fact, the whole text of the poem denounces materialism which the poet has seen around him. In "The World is Too Much With Us", the speaker laments the loss of man's intimate connection to the natural world in the wake of industrialism and a greater desire for worldly success.

In the first line of the stanzas, The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending; By the start of the 19th century, nature was no longer the place of mystery it always had been, filled with man’s animistic impulses, but increasingly the province of science and physical laws, such as Copernicus, Lamarck, Newton, and eventually Darwin. It wasn’t nature that Wordsworth loved  but what nature symbolized and that was the redefinition of nature that Wordsworth resisted.

Meanwhile, late is probably best understood as “in recent times” or lately. On the other hand, the word spend, having the sense of consuming, wasting, using up and exhausting. 

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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.

In the next part, Wordsworth describes the Sea. She is a woman her bares her bosom to the moon. This is what he means by seeing in Nature what is ours. The metaphor of the Sea as a woman baring her bosom, gives to the Sea a purpose, a vision, and moral that is human and ours.

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.

In the last part, He cries to God that he would rather surrender his soul, risk the eternal damnation of a heathen, than surrender his poet’s and human vision of Nature. The sight of Proteus rising from the sea is the vision of a poet and the symbolic of humankind’s ability and need to imbue Nature with what is ours. There’s another sense of the Pagan that might pertain. The Pagan’s view of the world was thought to be simple and naive.

Well, that was all the analysis toward a poem entitled “The World Is Too Much With Us” by Wordsword. I hope this article going to help you guys in finding the points and see you in the next article.. JJ