The World Is Too Much with Us

Wordsworth’s sonnet begins with the titular observation that the world “is too much with us” (Line 1). The world in question is not the natural world that Wordsworth idealizes throughout the poem but the man-made, industrial world he disdains. Wordsworth sees this new industrialized world as an overpowering and oppressive force that has robbed him and his fellow English citizens of their “powers” (Line 2). The pressure to be “getting and spending” (Line 2) at all times has made Wordsworth’s highly materialistic world feel inescapable and like it is “too much” (Line 1) or too often surrounding and influencing him. From the first line, Wordsworth despairs at his inability to find a reprieve from his consumerist society.

After acknowledging the constant, oppressive influence of the commercial world, Wordsworth notes, “Little we see in Nature that is ours” (Line 3). In addition to wasting their innate, personal powers, people also do not possess any part of nature; there is no knowledge or experience obtained through nature that they can recognize as their own. The capitalization of the word Nature signifies Wordsworth’s reverence for it and his regard for “Nature” as a distinct, almost deified entity. Rather than observing and learning from this spiritual entity, people have “given [their] hearts away” (Line 4) and placed their affections in buying “sordid” (Line 4) and secular man-made goods.

In the second quatrain, Wordsworth shifts his attention from the corrupted, materialistic world to the purer natural world that has been ignored. The first image he conjures is the “Sea that bares her bosom to the moon” (Line 5). The capitalization of the word “Sea,” the use of the female pronoun “her,” and the reference to female biology personify the natural body of water as a woman, and Wordsworth uses the erotic and anthropomorphized image of a woman baring or exposing her bosom to represent the connection between the moon and the tides. Coupled with the previous reference to people giving their “hearts away” (Line 4) to a consumerist lifestyle, the feminine Sea takes on the role of a jilted lover. Ignored by humanity, she bares her bosom to the moon instead, a representation of the intimate relationship between all natural phenomena that humankind cannot appreciate or participate in.

After describing the image of winds “howling at all hours” (Line 6) and gathering together like “sleeping flowers” (Line 7), Wordsworth laments that all of this beauty goes unnoticed and unappreciated. For this beauty and “for everything” nature offers, humans are “out of tune” (Line 8), and their emotions unmoved (Line 9). This disconnect is also expressed in the poem’s first line when Wordsworth describes humanity’s state of being paradoxically both too “late and soon.” No matter how Wordsworth and his countrymen might try to change, a life of consumerism and industry has made connecting with and appreciating nature a physical impossibility.

It is in the poem’s concluding sestet (last six lines) that Wordsworth expresses the depth of his yearning for a different world and attempts to move beyond a defeatist and “forlorn” (Line 12) rumination on society. He speculates how a unification with nature could still become possible and, in a moment of deliberate irony, declares, “Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (Lines 9-10). His exclamation invokes the Christian God, only to reject that religious system altogether. The materialistic world that causes Wordsworth such despair is one that sprung from a Christian worldview, so to Wordsworth Christianity itself is corrupted by association. In order to be truly free of his corrupt society, Wordsworth must abandon every facet of it and discover a more fitting spirituality from mankind’s past.

This declaration is the first time in the poem that Wordsworth adopts a singular first-person pronoun. Throughout the sonnet, Wordsworth uses plural pronouns, grouping himself with the rest of the human race. He acknowledges that the world is too much with “us,” that “we” waste our powers, and that “we” have given our hearts away, indicating he too is complicit in humanity’s severance from nature. Wordsworth’s wish to become a pagan is the first time he speaks only for himself, and that change in pronoun denotes his personal resolve to find that spirituality he believes can be found in nature.

For Wordsworth, the link between nature and spirituality existed most strongly in the ancient world. He alludes to Proteus and Triton, two sea gods from Greek mythology, and wishes to be a pagan, if only to be able “have sight” (Line 13) of such deities when he looks at the sea. He tries to imagine what it would be like to see Proteus “rising from the sea” (Line 13) and to hear Triton “blow his wreathed horn” (Line 14) like the ancient Greeks seemingly could. He longs for some meaningful spiritual encounter with the divine in an increasingly secular and industrialized world, and he sees paganism as a means to that end. If he could only hear Triton’s “wreathed horn,” then he could finally be in “tune” (Line 8) and “move” to the music of nature and the universe.