THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets, whose theories and style created a new tradition in poetry.

William Wordsworth was at once the oldest, the greatest, and the most long-lived among the romantic poets. He made himself the leader of the Romantic Movement. The basic traits (attributes) of romanticism such as the love of nature, the belief in humanity, mysticism, revolutionary spirit etc. were early developed in his poetry. As a young man he had high hopes for humanity and he had been nurtured in the Lake District which helped him to think well on man. He also read Rousseau’s view on the innocence of man. Thus, the teaching of Rousseau and his own experience convinced him that man was naturally good. He greatly supported the dawn of a new era for the humanity.

The whole of his early life had been a dedication to poetry, and from his childhood he had stored his mind with the experience in nature which later he was recall in is verse. His best-known works are The Prelude, The Lyrical Ballads, Tintern Abbey and a number of sonnets. Wordsworth is especially regarded as a poet of nature. For him, nature is a healer and he ascribes healing properties to.  In most of the poems of Wordsworth nature is constructed as both a healing entity and a teacher or moral guardian. Nature is considered in his poems as a living personality. He is a true worshiper of nature: nature's devotee or high priest. He dwells with great satisfaction, on the prospects of spending his time in groves and valleys and on the banks of streams that will lull him to rest with their soft murmur.  

Much of Wordsworth's easy flow of conversational blank verse has true lyrics power and grace, and his finest work is permeated by a sense of the human relationship to external; nature that is religious in its scope and intensity. To Wordsworth, God was everywhere manifest in the harmony of nature, and he felt deeply the kinship between nature and the soul of humankind.  The tide of critical opinion turned in his favour after 1820, and Wordsworth lived to see his work universally praised. In 1842 he was awarded a government pension, and in the year he succeeded Southey as poet Laureate. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS OF THE POEM:

The World Is Too Much With Us is a sonnet with an ABBAABBACDCDCD rhyme scheme. The poem is written from a place of angst (anxiety) and frustration. All around him, Wordsworth sees people who are obsessed (haunted) with money and with man-made objects. These people are losing their powers of divinity, and can no longer identify with the natural world. This idea is encapsulated (put in a short or concise form; reduce in volume) in the famous lines: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours." Wordsworth believes that we have given our hearts (the center of ourselves) away in exchange for money and material wealth. He is disgusted at this especially because nature is so readily available; it almost calls to humanity. In the end, Wordsworth decides that he would rather be a pagan (a person who follows a polytheistic or pre-Christian religion <not a Christian or Muslim or Jew>) in a complete state of disillusionment than be out of touch with nature.

The final image of the poem is of Wordsworth standing on a lea (or a tract of open land) overlooking the ocean where he sees Proteus (<Greek mythology> a prophetic god who served Poseidon; was capable of changing his shape at will) and Triton (<Greek mythology> a sea god; son of Poseidon). He is happy, but this happiness is not what the reader is meant to feel. In actuality, the reader should feel saddened by the scene, because Wordsworth has given up on humanity, choosing instead to slip out of reality.