The World Is Too Much with Us

William Wordsworth’s poem, “The World Is Too Much with Us” is a poem that surrounds the theme of nature.  The tone of the poem is that of anger as the speaker displays his discontent towards the modernization of the world and the way in which we are so disconnected from nature.  The speaker immediately displays his anger  in the first three lines of the poem as he states “… Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours.”  The writer states that we do not take the time out to appreciate the meaningful things in life.  We are so caught up in getting and spending time and money on the things in the world, that we often fail to realize that what nature offers us is free and it has more value than what the modern world can offer us.  His capitalization of the letter “N” in the word Nature in line three was probably done to reiterate the ownership we as readers should have towards nature.  The writer also states that we are so caught up in the “modern world” that we tend to ignore the cries of nature as he states here in lines six to eight,”This Sea that bears her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling  at all hours … For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”  The speaker uses these lines to show us the readers of the poem the way in which nature cries out to us for attention and yet we fail to realize her cries.  Wordsworth may have chosen to deliberately write this poem in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, where the first eight lines or octave of the poem  seemed to have addressed a problem and the last six lines, sestet; gave us the solution to the problem addressed above as he states, ” I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn …”.