19 pages • 38 minutes read
William WordsworthThe World Is Too Much with Us
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1807A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Wordsworth adopts the structure of the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet in “The World Is Too Much With Us.” The poem contains 14 lines, separated into one octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), with an abba abba cdcdcd rhyme scheme, and the poem maintains a consistent iambic pentameter. True to the form of the Petrarchan sonnet, “The World Is Too Much With Us” also contains a volta or “turn” on the ninth line. In typical Petrarchan sonnets, the ninth line of verse between the octave and sestet is a volta, a moment in which the building conflict turns into some kind of resolution. Here, Wordsworth leaves off his grim observations of society and the forgotten natural world and tries to find a solution in ancient, pagan religion.
The choice to compose “The World Is Too Much With Us” with the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet, a form that was invariably used for love poetry, reflects the tone of the poem itself. The sonnet essentially acts as a love poem from Wordsworth towards nature. Like a Petrarchan poet, Wordsworth describes how the object of his affections, the sea, bares her breast and chastises the people who have given their hearts away to a different lover. The form of the Petrarchan sonnet embodies Wordsworth’s at times sensual and romantic depiction of nature.
Personification
Throughout the sonnet, Wordsworth personifies nature in different ways. He initially depicts nature, specifically the sea, as a woman with feminine pronouns and a “bosom” and personifies the sea as the moon’s lover. Later, Wordsworth ascribes to the sea the features of the male gods Triton and Proteus. He characterizes the motion of waves as the god Proteus “rising from the sea” (Line 13) and the sound of roaring water and crashing waves as the god Triton blowing on his “wreathed horn” (Line 14). In each instance, Wordsworth takes the daily occurrences of the natural world from the mundane and gives them life through personification.
This personification of nature as an active, living being contrasts with his depiction of actual humanity. Wordsworth’s descriptions of society and people are often left quite vague and are quite generalized; the only thing Wordsworth describes humans doing in the poem is spending money. They passively allow their powers to waste away and cannot obtain anything in nature to call their own. While the sea bares its bosom, the winds howl, and the sea rises and blows its horn, humans are comparably inactive and treated less like individuals. They are merely an inert and weak collective, while nature possesses distinct physical traits, personality, and action.
Sound
While the description of the physical sights of nature takes much of the poem’s focus, the sense of sound (or lack thereof) is also integral to the poem’s understanding of nature. He mentions the winds “howling at all hours” (Line 6), and he imagines the sound of Triton’s horn being blown to describe the sound of the sea’s waves. However, Wordsworth acknowledges that all people, including himself, are “out of tune” (Line 8) for “everything” nature offers and that the rhythm of nature “moves us not” (Line 9). Because of his disconnect with nature, Wordsworth can only imagine the sound of Triton’s horn, and he offers no specific description of what the winds’ howl actually sounds like, nor does he describe the sound of Triton’s horn. He only describes the horn as “wreathed” (Line 14), a characteristic of its appearance and not of its sound. Wordsworth’s inability to even articulate the sounds he hears serves as a powerful reminder of how severe humanity’s divorce from nature has become.
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By William Wordsworth
