Today’s Poem: The World Is Too Much With Us

The disenchantment of the modern world

John Martin, Ruins of an Ancient City, c. 1815 (Cleveland Museum of Art)

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The World Is Too Much With Us

by William Wordsworth

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 wreathèd horn.
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In 1807, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) published a Petrarchan sonnet titled “The World Is Too Much With Us.” The meter is interesting, iambic but with an extra unstressed syllable in lines 2, 8, 11, and 13. But the flaw in the poem comes in line 9 — a break from the deliberate Italian form, like a small skip in a record spinning on a turntable.

Except that it’s Wordsworth, writing at something like the fullness of his powers. The chances that the mistake was unnoticed, or that he couldn’t have solved the problem if he wanted to, are basically null. The stutter-step in the ninth line, we have to assume, is deliberate, and it makes the poem a tour de force, a master’s play. Whether it also influences how we read the poem, whether it touches on the theme, that’s something that needs to be considered.

Rhymed strictly (abba-abba in the octave, the first eight lines, and cdc-dcd in the sestet, the final six lines, in Wordsworth’s poem), a Petrarchan sonnet takes a strong turn (a volta, as it’s called) between the octave and the sestet. And Wordsworth makes that volta, from the complaint about the modern condition (in lines 1–8) to the description of what it would have been like to be an ancient, a believer in the old Greek gods (in lines 9–14).

The trick — or the flaw, or the flexing play — is that the poem stutters to start the volta on the third beat, carrying over the flow of the octave two feet into the sestet:

8: For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
9: It moves us not.
                                 Great God! I’d rather be
10: A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn

As for the burden of the poem, it concerns the perceived cost of what the modern age has brought us. The high-school literature textbook reading takes its cue entirely from the second line, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” reducing the poem to an over-easy complaint about capitalism.

That complaint is certainly present, but Wordsworth means much more. How, for example, would believing in the Greek gods relieve us of the market economy? The ancient and (often, in such literature, the medieval) are praised because they came before the modern era. And capitalism is only one of the supposed causes of disenchantment in modernity.

In the first line we see the presence of such things as timekeeping clocks, journalism, and, yes, commercial transactions that are “too much with us.” In the third to the seventh, we see our alienation from nature. Science, of course. And all the other elective affinities that gave birth to modernity and stripped it down to a thin world.

In the volta, we get Wordsworth’s imagination of the thick world of antiquity. Where we moderns are “out of tune,” the ancient Greeks, those pagans with their “creed outworn,” could hear “old Triton” sound “his wreathèd horn” — and, Wordsworth thinks, feel less “forlorn” than moderns.

A Wedgwood Triton candlestick, c. 1790 (Brooklyn Museum)

The poets’ sense of thin modernity is a topic we’ve taken up here before at Poems Ancient and Modern — when we looked, for example, at Poe’s “To Science,” Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Rousseau is the likely font (rather than Marx, who thought of his system as fully modern, a scientific materialism, and comes after Wordsworth, anyway). But, as we concluded about Poe’s “To Science,” no sane person can doubt that the medical and ethical gains of the modern age were worth many of their costs. But we must remember that those costs were real, and no sane person can deny them either.

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