Excellent post. This was the first poem I ever committed to memory without my consciously doing so. I just woke up one day and realized I knew the whole thing. Great point about the meter—as you know, it’s definitely not a fault: the poem becomes “out of tune” for a moment, so the sound reflects the sense.
I've always loved this poem, but never taught it, so never got really far into the details. Thanks for this explication, which makes it even richer to me.
Can anyone point me towards concrete textual evidence for Rousseau’s impact on Romanticism? It seems a Babbitian slur, to me. Something to reconsider *very* seriously. He’s not favorable in the big six, not in the Germans, not even in Burke. Where is he, concretely?
This is a finely pitched reading that, rightly, brings out the way the "conventional" sonnet structure is subtly stretched, the pitch from octave to sestet landing not at the end of line 8 but hinging rather on the "Good God!" of line 9.
For me, I've always been a little uncertain about two ambiguities (in the Empsonian sense, perhaps) in the poem. With the sestet: is Wordsworth actually expressing a preference for classical mythology over Christian revelation? Lots of Romantic and post-Romantic poets (Swinburne say) genuinely did so: which is, they actually preferred the classical pantheon to Christianity, or said they did. But is Wordsworth doing that? When Blake says "sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" he's not saying, 'it's a toss-up, kill infants or repress your desires, do what you like, LOL' -- he's saying: "imagine the worst thing you can think of: murdering infant children. Clearly that's the absolute worst. Well then, nursing unacted desires is *even worse than that*." Maybe that's what Wordsworth means here: "honestly, the howling pressures of our material world are so ghastly, so overwhelming, I'd as soon give-up my Christianity altogether as face it." Or maybe he means: "Christianity lacks the capacity to address the hideous overwhelming materiality of modern life, but maybe a retreat to classical paganism would ..." I'm honestly not sure.
The other ambiguity is the opening line. Do we read: "The world is too much with us" as the world overwhelms us, it is too pressing and intimate and just *too much* --- or do we read: "The world is too much, with us": which would be, "the world itself maybe fine, or sufficient, or in balance, but *in our specific case* *because of our problems, or issues, or insufficiences) it comes across as overwhelming." This might strike you as pettifogging, but I suspect it makes a big difference. Is this a poem about "the world", as overwhelming, or about "us" as incapable of managing even a regular world.
I like your reading of the "flawed" volta—the hesitation for me emphasizing that the slangy apostrophe "great God" isn't quite the typical Italianate transition to divine matters. It is "out of tune," as the poet says. I would add that the poem gains remarkable force thereafter, through allusions to Spenser and Milton, and in the sonorous quality of its last line, which contains symmetrical syntax (adj noun verb adj noun) and sound patterning (or...ea...o...ow...ea...or). It ends "in tune," as it were.
Oh, I like that thought about the last line. In the volta, however, I think the "Great God" works. It acknowledges *the* God, who made the ancient creeds "outworn." And it locates us in the moment of 1802, when the turn to the modern was fully in place — but belief in God was still held. The poem is not a rejection of God but, with that apostrophe, something like a prayer: God, restore to us the thickness of the world, since I'd rather be a pagan than live in this thinness.
Of course, Weber thought of Protestantism itself as one of the prime motors of the turn to the modern, a stripping of the altars, but Wordsworth wouldn't have argued that.
As we destroy our time with busyness, who does not hear, from time to time, a bird call, or see a sunset, and wonder why and what we have lost, for all our gain. However worded, the reality of the world, as man has created it, seeps through, and lays bare what was, and now, for the most part is gone.
I was surprised to see the caesura in line 9 of Wordsworth's poem described, even tentatively, as a flaw. I don't agree with that characterization. The technique is not rare. Elizabeth Barrett Browning put a similar "stutter" in her first sonnet from the Portuguese, "I thought once how Theocritus had sung." John Milton inserted a pause after three beats in the 9th line of his Sonnet 19, "When I consider how my light is spent." Attentive readers can find other examples.
Seeing this poetic technique described as a flaw brought to my mind the Monty Python sketch about a man who wanted to buy a license for his pet halibut: "I am not a loony. Why should I be tarred with the epithet ‘loony’ merely because I have a pet halibut? I’ve heard tell that Sir Gerald Nabarro has a pet prawn called Simon - you wouldn’t call him a loony! Furthermore Dawn Pathorpe, the lady showjumper, had a clam called Stafford, after the late chancellor. Alan Bullock has two pikes, both called Chris, and Marcel Proust had an ‘addock! So if you’re calling the author of ‘A la recherche de temps perdu’ a loony, I shall have to ask you to step outside!"
Of course it's a flaw — in the sense of a violation of the strict Italianate form. But, as you point out, English came to allow it. So, suggest I, Wordsworth did it deliberately. And what does that tell us? The "o" sounds of line 9's first three feet transition us from the octave to the sestet, and Wordsworth's appeal to God — the God who made the Greek gods "outworn" — that opens the volta situates us historically: In 1807 (1802, when he seems to have composed the sonnet), we still had God, but we also had a faded enchantment of the world. I think the deliberate violation of the strictures of the form brilliant.
Eric — I meant to thank you for mentioning these poems, which sent me back to look at them. The EB Browning is exactly as you say, with the volta beginning at the third beat of the ninth line, but done, I think, in the shadow of Wordsworth:
8: Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
9: A shadow across me. // Straightway I was 'ware,
10: So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
But the Milton is trickier. The volta seems to me actually to come early, not late, with the third foot of the eighth line:
Wordworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" seems to take a step toward appreciation of a world more urban if not yet modernized. He sings of the first splendour of valley, rock or hill, but only after the captivation expressed in these lines--
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
Thank you for beginning the day with this music. ~Z
Extraordinary --do I have this right?--this poet only lived to his 34th year. When I think of poems I wrote when I was thirty-three. . . Don't know if the line breaks will hold, but here's
"Fall"
The city’s calm today, a light mist falls.
The dawn will meet the constant thrum of cars
that file by twos, close-packed, across the strand.
Nearby, a marquee tots the numbers up,
by day, by hour, of humans being birthed.
Along the quay, trees lifting up their arms
stand side by side, and touch the brightened sky
with flecks of yellow, red, and amber-gold:
around each tree, a rising pulse of air.
The pools of shade shared in summer grow small
as leaves are sent to ground by wind and rain.
Sturdy, long-lived, the trees will soon pull back,
and then leaves that like hands don’t often reach
across the path to join may touch, as stems
at last spring free and fall: Then how they’ll twine
That's a fascinating poem when you consider how filthy 1802 London actually was, and the way the poem (like the morning itself, all in the speaker's eye and consciousness) imposes a sort of unfallen order and cleanliness on it, as if to redeem it from its corruption.
Yes, reading the entirely urban landscape in pastoral terms is a very striking thing WW does in 'On Westminster Bridge'. I'm sorry to include a link to my own blog (poor form, really) but I talk about this poem at some length there -- where I aim to come back to Jody's excellent comments on 'The World Is Too Much With Us' when I've a moment: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/on-westminster-bridge-1743-1803-cbcc2844b217
Excellent post. This was the first poem I ever committed to memory without my consciously doing so. I just woke up one day and realized I knew the whole thing. Great point about the meter—as you know, it’s definitely not a fault: the poem becomes “out of tune” for a moment, so the sound reflects the sense.
I've always loved this poem, but never taught it, so never got really far into the details. Thanks for this explication, which makes it even richer to me.
Can anyone point me towards concrete textual evidence for Rousseau’s impact on Romanticism? It seems a Babbitian slur, to me. Something to reconsider *very* seriously. He’s not favorable in the big six, not in the Germans, not even in Burke. Where is he, concretely?
This is a finely pitched reading that, rightly, brings out the way the "conventional" sonnet structure is subtly stretched, the pitch from octave to sestet landing not at the end of line 8 but hinging rather on the "Good God!" of line 9.
For me, I've always been a little uncertain about two ambiguities (in the Empsonian sense, perhaps) in the poem. With the sestet: is Wordsworth actually expressing a preference for classical mythology over Christian revelation? Lots of Romantic and post-Romantic poets (Swinburne say) genuinely did so: which is, they actually preferred the classical pantheon to Christianity, or said they did. But is Wordsworth doing that? When Blake says "sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" he's not saying, 'it's a toss-up, kill infants or repress your desires, do what you like, LOL' -- he's saying: "imagine the worst thing you can think of: murdering infant children. Clearly that's the absolute worst. Well then, nursing unacted desires is *even worse than that*." Maybe that's what Wordsworth means here: "honestly, the howling pressures of our material world are so ghastly, so overwhelming, I'd as soon give-up my Christianity altogether as face it." Or maybe he means: "Christianity lacks the capacity to address the hideous overwhelming materiality of modern life, but maybe a retreat to classical paganism would ..." I'm honestly not sure.
The other ambiguity is the opening line. Do we read: "The world is too much with us" as the world overwhelms us, it is too pressing and intimate and just *too much* --- or do we read: "The world is too much, with us": which would be, "the world itself maybe fine, or sufficient, or in balance, but *in our specific case* *because of our problems, or issues, or insufficiences) it comes across as overwhelming." This might strike you as pettifogging, but I suspect it makes a big difference. Is this a poem about "the world", as overwhelming, or about "us" as incapable of managing even a regular world.
I like your reading of the "flawed" volta—the hesitation for me emphasizing that the slangy apostrophe "great God" isn't quite the typical Italianate transition to divine matters. It is "out of tune," as the poet says. I would add that the poem gains remarkable force thereafter, through allusions to Spenser and Milton, and in the sonorous quality of its last line, which contains symmetrical syntax (adj noun verb adj noun) and sound patterning (or...ea...o...ow...ea...or). It ends "in tune," as it were.
Oh, I like that thought about the last line. In the volta, however, I think the "Great God" works. It acknowledges *the* God, who made the ancient creeds "outworn." And it locates us in the moment of 1802, when the turn to the modern was fully in place — but belief in God was still held. The poem is not a rejection of God but, with that apostrophe, something like a prayer: God, restore to us the thickness of the world, since I'd rather be a pagan than live in this thinness.
Of course, Weber thought of Protestantism itself as one of the prime motors of the turn to the modern, a stripping of the altars, but Wordsworth wouldn't have argued that.
As we destroy our time with busyness, who does not hear, from time to time, a bird call, or see a sunset, and wonder why and what we have lost, for all our gain. However worded, the reality of the world, as man has created it, seeps through, and lays bare what was, and now, for the most part is gone.
I was surprised to see the caesura in line 9 of Wordsworth's poem described, even tentatively, as a flaw. I don't agree with that characterization. The technique is not rare. Elizabeth Barrett Browning put a similar "stutter" in her first sonnet from the Portuguese, "I thought once how Theocritus had sung." John Milton inserted a pause after three beats in the 9th line of his Sonnet 19, "When I consider how my light is spent." Attentive readers can find other examples.
Seeing this poetic technique described as a flaw brought to my mind the Monty Python sketch about a man who wanted to buy a license for his pet halibut: "I am not a loony. Why should I be tarred with the epithet ‘loony’ merely because I have a pet halibut? I’ve heard tell that Sir Gerald Nabarro has a pet prawn called Simon - you wouldn’t call him a loony! Furthermore Dawn Pathorpe, the lady showjumper, had a clam called Stafford, after the late chancellor. Alan Bullock has two pikes, both called Chris, and Marcel Proust had an ‘addock! So if you’re calling the author of ‘A la recherche de temps perdu’ a loony, I shall have to ask you to step outside!"
Of course it's a flaw — in the sense of a violation of the strict Italianate form. But, as you point out, English came to allow it. So, suggest I, Wordsworth did it deliberately. And what does that tell us? The "o" sounds of line 9's first three feet transition us from the octave to the sestet, and Wordsworth's appeal to God — the God who made the Greek gods "outworn" — that opens the volta situates us historically: In 1807 (1802, when he seems to have composed the sonnet), we still had God, but we also had a faded enchantment of the world. I think the deliberate violation of the strictures of the form brilliant.
Eric — I meant to thank you for mentioning these poems, which sent me back to look at them. The EB Browning is exactly as you say, with the volta beginning at the third beat of the ninth line, but done, I think, in the shadow of Wordsworth:
8: Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
9: A shadow across me. // Straightway I was 'ware,
10: So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
But the Milton is trickier. The volta seems to me actually to come early, not late, with the third foot of the eighth line:
8: I fondly ask. // But Patience, to prevent
9: That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
10: Either man's work or His own gifts. . . .
Wordworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" seems to take a step toward appreciation of a world more urban if not yet modernized. He sings of the first splendour of valley, rock or hill, but only after the captivation expressed in these lines--
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
Thank you for beginning the day with this music. ~Z
Extraordinary --do I have this right?--this poet only lived to his 34th year. When I think of poems I wrote when I was thirty-three. . . Don't know if the line breaks will hold, but here's
"Fall"
The city’s calm today, a light mist falls.
The dawn will meet the constant thrum of cars
that file by twos, close-packed, across the strand.
Nearby, a marquee tots the numbers up,
by day, by hour, of humans being birthed.
Along the quay, trees lifting up their arms
stand side by side, and touch the brightened sky
with flecks of yellow, red, and amber-gold:
around each tree, a rising pulse of air.
The pools of shade shared in summer grow small
as leaves are sent to ground by wind and rain.
Sturdy, long-lived, the trees will soon pull back,
and then leaves that like hands don’t often reach
across the path to join may touch, as stems
at last spring free and fall: Then how they’ll twine
their tips, and blur and overlap, then press
the rain-wet ground. Above, how fiercely arms
will rise against façades of chalky marble,
the stone stained dark by then by acid rain.
That's a fascinating poem when you consider how filthy 1802 London actually was, and the way the poem (like the morning itself, all in the speaker's eye and consciousness) imposes a sort of unfallen order and cleanliness on it, as if to redeem it from its corruption.
Yes, reading the entirely urban landscape in pastoral terms is a very striking thing WW does in 'On Westminster Bridge'. I'm sorry to include a link to my own blog (poor form, really) but I talk about this poem at some length there -- where I aim to come back to Jody's excellent comments on 'The World Is Too Much With Us' when I've a moment: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/on-westminster-bridge-1743-1803-cbcc2844b217
Not poor form at all!