The World Is Too Much With Us And God's Grandeur

The poets, William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, use things like imagery, figurative language, and other poetic devices in their poems to convey their views of modern society and nature that they share. Some examples are in Williams’s poem, “The World is Too Much With Us”, and Gerard’s poem, “God’s Grandeur”. The two authors use different poetic devices, but convey similar views.
William’s poem starts off with the proclamation that “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours;” (Wordsworth). This statement says that we, as humans, are too concerned with materialistic items that we cannot appreciate nature. We see nothing to be gained from nature, and thusly do not spend the time to appreciate it. Midway through the poem, William uses imagery of the moon on the water and the winds to show the splendor of the world and how serene it is. Later, William states that he is willing to believe in ancient beliefs just to see the world in a different, more beautiful way. Here, he uses historical allusions of pagan gods to demonstrate the beauty that can exist in the world if you pay attention.

Here Gerard states that though the world is made beautiful by God, it will fade and diminish. He uses a simile to demonstrate the way in which the world’s beauty will fade. Gerard then expresses his confusion as to why people do not appreciate the beauty of the Earth while it lasts, and instead tarnish the soil with the stains of industry. In the second stanza, Gerard makes the proclamation that even with all that man, as a race, has done to sully nature, it still lays hidden in the woodworks. It hides, while God, The Holy Ghost himself, looks over the world with bright