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.
Notes
Somewhere between earning a living and buying the things we think we need, we forget how to look at the world around us. William Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much with Us captures this exhaustion with remarkable clarity. The sea, the winds, and the moon remain before us, yet our attention has been consumed by commerce and possession. Wordsworth recognizes something more troubling than individual distraction. When everything acquires an exchange value, our relationship with nature becomes increasingly instrumental. We begin to understand the world through what it can provide rather than through our experience of belonging to it. Alienation becomes an ordinary condition of modern life. October's Decay need not appear as a dying forest or a polluted river. Sometimes it begins much earlier, when a living landscape becomes a collection of resources, and we lose the ability to recognize what has already been taken from us. #WilliamWordsworth #RomanticPoetry #Ecocriticism #PoliticalEcology #EnvironmentalPhilosophy