RomAntics IV: Spotlight on... Wordsworth's World

The World Is Too Much With Us

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.

Wordsworth’s opening gambit in this sonnet is a bold one, its fundamental assertion lying in an idea that the world’s very presence is overbearing, suffocating, indeed, over-present. But a distance remains; the world is not too much around us, in us or, in some inchoate, transcendent way, too good for us, or above us. In that sense, Wordsworth’s choice of the vague preposition, ‘with’, suggests merely a quiet companionship exists between humans and the world they inhabit. (Do we inhabit, though - or own it? Or exist alongside?) His insistence that the world is too much with us, in any case, implies that what should be an untroubled, quiet companionship, has become unbalanced and lost its equilibrium. As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth’s ‘world’ is ‘unintelligible’, inexplicable and undefined across the sonnet’s first two lines. Perhaps it is only determinable in terms of negation, by what it fails to represent: by the sonnet’s third line, Wordsworth’s definition of ‘world’ retrospectively gains some clarity, even if only because it is set against Nature; ‘little we see in Nature that is ours’. Nature and the ‘world’, then, are distinct, even oppugnant, poles of experience.

Wordsworth’s definition of ‘world’ mirrors Chaucer’s - everything that is ‘worldly’, transactional, artificial - and it stands in contradistinction to a natural world that could afford humans a richer, riper, more abundant relationship. In a ‘sordid boon’, representative of the human instinct to mercantilism and unthinking profit-making, ‘we’ - Wordsworth’s ubiquitous use of the universalising collective pronoun cropping up - have sacrificed our ‘hearts’, our initial impulse for unity, divorcing ourselves from a Natural World in favour of the earthly, mundane, dismal ‘world’. Formally, the poem reflects this too; the first four lines are garbled, polysyllabic, overbrimming with consonants and caesura (‘late and soon,/ Getting and spending’) - the dejected heaviness of the world seems to stagnate Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow’ of words. But once ‘Nature’ is invoked, it is as if the poet is freed up to construct unbroken, looser, alliterative phrases: ‘This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;/ The winds that will be howling at all hours’. His former tighter, clunkier construction returns when Wordsworth returns to the sonnet’s polemic point at lines 8-9: ‘For this, for everything, we are out of tune;/ It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be/[...]’. Gone are the enjambed clauses - returned is the tight-lipped, reticent admission that something has been lost.

As in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth pitches a comforting, grounding natural world against ‘the fretful stir/ Unprofitable, and the fever of the world’. In Act I Scene ii, Shakespeare’s Hamlet uses strikingly similar language: ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!’. And in King Lear, Edgar’s repeated apostrophe, ‘World, world, O world,/ But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,/ Life would not yield to age’ gives voice to the exhaustingly dysfunctional, alienating non-relationship between humans and the world. The world, to Edgar, is ‘strange’, ‘mutat[ed]’, ‘hate[ful]’ - as Wordsworth writes here, ‘we are out of tune’.

The Pagans got it right, Wordsworth insists - their simplicity and affinity with the world afforded them ‘glimpses’ of greatness. They could see ‘Proteus’ and ‘Triton’ - nature gods, and thus synecdoches for an absolute unity - the human-nature-divine triangle towards which Wordsworth grasps in so much of his poetry. When Kent bemoans the characters striving to awaken Lear upon death - ‘O, let him pass! He hates him/ That would upon the rack of this tough world/ Stretch him out longer’ - he could almost have said that the ‘world is too much with’ Lear. Both Shakespeare and Wordsworth’s conceptions of ‘world’ in these examples refer to a structure which once glittered with a quiescent potential for unity and co-operation, but one which humans have dulled and corrupted. Crucially, for both writers, the ‘world’ rests apart from ‘Nature’ - indeed, nature is often touted as the antidote to an overburdening world. Perhaps in Pagan eras, ‘world’ and ‘nature’ were synonymous, and certainly Wordsworth thinks so - that was the ‘power’ we have ‘waste[d]’ - but just as ‘we [gave] our hearts away’, we relinquished this former, effortless cohesion.

As for me, this poem best expresses ‘world’ because it unflinchingly examines our relationship to, and treatment of, the world. The ‘world’ - far too vast and general an idea to fully comprehend, as Wordsworth admits - exists as an alienating, messy, frenetic place - and to have a guiltless relationship with Nature has become impossible. But that doesn’t mean it cannot afford us pleasure - Wordsworth’s very awareness that in human history, things have once been better, implies a hope that they may improve again. Even though ‘we’, humans as a collective conglomerate, have become ‘out of tune’ with a sacrosanct and endangered world, it is the poet’s, the activist’s, the compassionate’s, job to campaign, even gospelise, the reasons we should love and protect our environment. This isn’t elitist - Wordsworth isn’t pitching himself above humans in some pitying, snobbish flourish whereby only he can see the true value of the world and its destruction is everyone else’s fault. Indeed, it is the inverse: the sonnet is a desperate cry from one of environmentalism’s first pioneers, a universalising call to arms (‘we’ after all, admits his own complicity), to look around us and better cherish the nature that could be ours, that ‘is ours’, but the nature which, inexplicably, we seem bent on destroying.