by Summer Waters

Created on: June 22, 2008

In his poem, 'The World is too Much with Us', Wordsworth combines great artistry with skilful use of structural features in order to create a sombre tone which clearly expresses Wordsworth's 'forlorn' despair at mankind's failure to appreciate the beauty of nature. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth evokes images of man as out of tune with nature, and of a world in which there is no space for humankind to fit in:

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!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
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! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Thus the poem, written using the form of the Petrarchan sonnet, evokes Wordsworth's frustration at being part of 'sordid' humankind, a wasteful and ignorant species. The tone is one of underlying lament that Wordsworth himself, though he wants so badly to glimpse the beauty of nature, has been born in a time of ignorance so that he too feels unable to appreciate the beauty of the world.

The use of the Petrachan sonnet format, with rhyming scheme ABBAABBA CDCDCD aids in Wordsworth's aim to divide the poem in two. The first octave describes Wordsworth's disgust at the human race, in which the repeated use of the word 'we' highlights his self-disgust at being equally guilty of the ignorance he laments. In contrast, the final sestet of the sonnet moves to a more personal exposition of his feelings, emphasised by his switch to the use of the word I', in which Wordsworth lays bare his own despair that he too feels unable to appreciate nature, and is 'forlorn' at the state of the world he lives in. He expresses regret at having not been born in earlier Pagan times, even though he considers it a 'creed outworn', since it would at least enable him to 'glimpse' the beauty of nature through Pagan mythology, in which nature and the gods are entwined.

The extent of Wordsworth's disgust at the wastefulness of mankind is highlighted in his use of language; we are 'out of tune' with 'Nature', an entity that is given God-like status by use of the capitalization. Mankind is always either

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