Why is the poet
depressed in the sonnet “The world is too much with us”?
What does he mean by the world being “too much with us”?
The narrator of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much
With Us” is somber and depressed, and spends the greater
part of this sonnet lamenting the condition of the world. Lines 2-3
can provide hints to the reader about why he laments:
Getting and spending, we lay waste our
powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours.” These lines
illustrate that the narrator believes his world wastes and squanders
the pagan powers he believes it could grasp through a relationship
with the natural world. Through a sensual personification of the sea
in line 5, he helps draw the reader into the idea that the sea and
the moon and “everything” (line 8) in nature is alive and
powerful. But, the narrator laments, “we are out of tune, it
moves us not” (8-9) the world is not moved by the imagination
as the narrator is. The narrator experiences such anguish that in
line ten he bursts out with “Great God” as an exclamation
and to expresses that he is so disgusted he wishes he has been raised
pagan, to see the magic and mystery and imagination he now sees in
nature. I believe Wordsworth chose “The World is Too
Much With Us” as a title for this poem to express that the
Christianized England he lived in held no place for people like
himself and his romantic contemporaries.
Combining both of these observations as your starting point, write
a paragraph that finds feelings and animation as these appear in his
very well known early poem, Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey (pp. 265-69).
Although Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey is a
poem chiefly about memory, Wordsworth manages to embed the poem with
many layers of meaning, including his own opinions on the animism of
nature and the poetic imagination, or “feelings”. The
former, the animism of nature, can be seen throughout the work. The
line break at 24 and the break at 49 enclose one significant section
of the poem in which the narrator refers to the “forms of
beauty” (24), which the footnotes identify as natural objects,
and how these forms are “felt in the blood, felt along the
heart, and passing even into my purer mind” (29-30). The “purer
mind”, the footnotes inform us, refer to the spiritual element
of Wordsworth. This section, then, is referring to how images of
nature affect him spiritually. Continuing through the poem,
Wordsworth recalls in detail his former experience at Tintern Abbey.
This section is particularly interesting because Wordsworth refers to
traveling the area “wherever nature led” (72) This
ascribes a specific animistic trait to nature. Nature is given more
animated traits in lines 80-81 when the narrator expresses that the
qualities he saw in nature were feelings within him- much like line
four of There is an Active Principle. At lines 111 and 112,
Wordsworth describes nature as being both a guide, a guardian, and
“all his moral being.” Finally, near the end of the poem
Wordsworth addresses nature directly and ascribes to her a trait of
honesty: that she can never be false to those who love her (34). It
is clear throughout the entire poem that animistic elements of nature
and the feelings which Wordsworth believed to be the root of poetry
go hand in hand. A chief element of this work is Wordsworth’s
expression of how nature can inspire and move a person (101). From
lines 96 and 97, it is clear that Wordsworth found the poetic
imagination and pantheistic ideas about nature to go hand in hand.
Within the poem Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth not only expresses a poignant portrayal of how
memories awoken can affect a person, but he also expresses several
very personal views of his own.
