The World is too Much With Us by William Wordsworth
I am writing this essay in order to give one interpretation of William Wordsworth's sonnet, "The World Is Too Much With Us". The poet seems to take the viewpoint of a Pagan and ascribes a godlike status to nature much along the way the Greeks did in their time. He then proceeds to use personification along with simile, metaphor, imagery and breaks in syntax to describe how we have fallen away or strayed from what nature meant us to be.
The poem starts off with the words in the title, "The world is too much with us, late and soon". This can be interpreted as how at times people can feel as though there is no recess from the world, or no way to "get away" from ourselves. This heaviness being brought upon us by the wasting of our "powers", and giving our "hearts away" to "getting and spending" of money and materialistic pursuits. When he says "Little we see in Nature that is ours", he seems to be saying that the human race has little left in common with the rest of what nature is. He capitalizes the word nature in this line as one would capitalize the word God or the pronoun Him in reference to God. In lines five-seven he uses vivid imagery to portray nature and again uses capitalization with the word "Sea" to illustrate the godly status he ascribes to the realm of nature. Line seven states "The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon" and here Wordsworth uses personification in referring to the sea as "her" to compare our giving our hearts away to materialistic pursuits, the way the bountiful ocean "bares" itself to the barren and desolate moon.
We see a fine example of how the poet uses simile during his descriptions of nature as in lines six and seven which s...
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...n him. In the last two lines Wordsworth mentions Proteus rising from the sea, and of hearing "Triton blow his wreathed horn". Proteus was an old man of the sea that could change shape. This could signify the poet's wish to change his own shape and become an animal or be like the sea itself and in that way closer to being godly. Triton was a sea deity blowing a conch shell, or an instrument. This could be metaphor for the art of poetry or art in general. A musician or an artist creates and is godlike in that sense.
In conclusion, no matter what interpretation one makes of this poem it is hard to argue that Wordsworth was against the prevailing religious atmosphere of his time. It is not too difficult to see why he is considered a revolutionary and a Romantic. He was born in 1770, and wrote this poem around 1806 during the conservative Victorian Age in England.
The poem opens upon comparisons, with lines 3 through 8 reading, “Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets/ of their branches. The maples/ were colored like apples,/part orange and red, part green./ The elms, already transparent trees,/ seemed swaying vases full of sky.” The narrator’s surroundings in this poem illustrate him; and the similes suggest that he is not himself, and instead he acts like others. Just as the maples are colored like apples, he
The World We're In by Will Hutton If you're American, you probably haven't heard of this book. "The
William Wordsworth rejected all the traditional assumptions about the proper style, words, and subject matter for a poem during the Romanics period. When explaining his writing Wordsworth said, “There will be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetry diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it.” (Marshall) Because he took such a different approach to his writing, many people criticized his poems. Literary critic Harold Bloom said, “The fear of mortality haunts much of Wordsworth’s best poetry, especially in regard to the premature mortality of the Imagination and the loss of its creative joy.” Wordsworth does in fact express fear of mortality in the poems The World is too much with us, London, 1802, The Prelude, and Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.
On the other hand Wordsworth believes that nature needs to be thought of, and properly "worshiped" when one is pondering about life, "They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude" (21-22). Wordsworth also believes that a person should go walk among nature and take in all of its beauty to understand nature itself. Though two poems may seem different simply because of the periods, they may be very
William Wordsworth, like Blake, was linked with Romanticism. In fact, he was one of the very founders of Romanticism. He wrote poems are about nature, freedom and emotion. He was open about how he felt about life and what his life was like. Also, Wordsworth wrote poems about the events going on around him ? for instance the French Revolution. Mainly, Wordsworth wrote about nature, however, rarely used simple descriptions in his work. Instead, Wordsworth wrote complexly, for example in his poem ?Daffodils?.
...eople that are from two different classes could talk about one poem and how they feel about it. This really changed the how poetry was viewed considering Wordsworth was one of the best of his time other poets look at what he was doing and responded to his actions and thoughts. Wordsworth explores common themes of the romantic era and makes them apparent to his readers by finding something important to the common man and using common diction.
and in? The Ancient Mariner? , we see that Coleridge shows the struggle against the overwhelming forces of nature. It is an important theme for the Romantic poets. Another difference between the two poets is that Wordsworth deals with everyday people from small villages, and while reading the words, I felt as if it was not a poem at all, but a story being told.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.
William Wordsworth is a British poet who is associated with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was seven years old, and he was an orphan at 13. This experience shapes much of his later work. Despite Wordsworth’s losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School, where he firmly established his love of poetry. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry.
Wordsworth is deeply involved with the complexities of nature and human reaction to it. To Wordsworth nature is the revelation of god through viewing everything that is harmonious or beautiful in nature. Man’s true character is then formed and developed through participation in this balance. Wordsworth had the view that people are at their best when they are closest to nature. Being close creates harmony and order. He thought that the people of his time were getting away from that.
All in all, throughout all the history of American poetry, we can easily find numerous poems concerning nature from different angles, for nature will never betray a nature-loving heart just as William Wordsworth says.
To conclude, William Wordsworth uses form and syntax and figurative language to stress on his mental journey, and to symbolize the importance of the beauty and peace of nature. In my opinion, the poet might have written this poem to show his appreciation towards nature. The poem has a happy mood especially when the poet is discussing the daffodils. In this poem the daffodils are characterized as more than flowers, but as humans “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6). In addition, the poet mentioned himself to be part of nature since nature inspires him to write and think. Therefore, the reason that the poet wrote this poem was to express the feeling of happiness in his mental journey in nature.
He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images of meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being whatever a person needs to move on, and without those objects, they can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them.