The poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us”, by William Wordsworth, is believed to have been written in the era where the ‘Industrial Revolution’ in England is in full progress. The world of rising capitalism and materialism is influencing the people of the times in every aspect of life. Sooner or later, all our humanly strength will go to waste in getting in plenty and endless spending our resources to meet our unlimited wants.
People can no longer see their dignity, honour and self respect. They have totally surrendered their hearts to a sordid, filthy and unhonourable benefit of materialism. Each evening that passes by, if only one can notice how the mighty seas expose it’s nudeness to the bright shining moon under the naked starry skies, and the powerful breeze blowing strongly yet endlessly, for long hours through the day and night. But now they are awaken from sleep just like flowers that begin to bloom, and giving the people a wake up call to wake up from this murderous slumber of uncontrolled materialistic attitude that does not match the ancient English virtues of refined idealism. Yet none of the people at that time are touched by the moving earthly spirit of the wind. Wordsworth cries out to God and expresses his supplication that he would rather be a heathen and feed upon a set of overdone beliefs and principles of pagan nature worship, than to be a part of such an immoral materialistic society.
He would prefer, by then, to stand in the middle of a pleasant meadow and have a brief view of the nature around and that would make him feel free from the fear of rejection, loneliness and sorrow. Perhaps, at times get the privilege of looking towards the sea for hours and see Proteus-a Greek demi-god of the sea who is capable of assuming a variety of appearances; rising out of the great waters. He may also get the privilege of hearing old Triton-another aquatic demi-god who is represented as half man and half dolphin; blow his curved and twisted horn

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.”

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 problem—he 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 wish—in 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 Wordsworth’s 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 canon—notably “London, 1802,” in which the speaker dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.