The World And Wordsworth Essay, Research Paper
William Wordsworth wrote a poem called The World is Too Much With Us . In this poem Wordsworth gives a warning to his generation. This warning is that they are losing sight of what is actually important in this world: nature and God. To some people both of these are the same thing. As if lacking appreciation for the natural gifts of God is not sin enough, we add to it the insult of pride for our rape of His land. With his words, Wordsworth makes this message everlasting. Let us look at the first four lines of the poem: The world is too much with us; late and soon, / 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! As I read this, four things come to my mind: materialism, wastefulness, selfishness, and the lack of respect for life (i.e. prostitution, murder, abortion). If you think about the time period that this was written and today, are these things not truer today than they were when they were written. In today s culture are we not a society of use what you want and waste what you don t consume. When reading the third line of this poem the idea that we are raised in a society that says I am not a part of nature and that all my needs do not mix with the idea of nature comes to my mind.
In the following versus form The World Wordsworth gives life to nature through his words and explains to us nature s agony and pain. The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, / For this, for everything, we are out of tune;/ It moves us not. -Great God! We do not listen, for we are not in tune with nature. We are not in tune because we are too important to ourselves that we may not listen to land, wind, rain, or sea. Between the following two ideas I do not know which would be the greatest sin: the pillage of the earth s natural beauty or man s torturous inhumanity toward his fellow brother. If I were given a choice I would have to choose the later.
One can tell that this poem is a Romantic poem because of the fact that it is filled with the love of natural things and the use of the imagination and emotion. These are only a few of the many things that are used in a Romantic poem but for Wordsworth it was enough.