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He then proceeds to use personification along with simile, metaphor, imagery and breaks in syntax to describe how we have fallen away or strayed from what nature meant us to be. The poem starts off with the words in the title, “The world is too much with us, late and soon”. This can be interpreted as how at times people can feel as though there is no recess from the world, or no way to “get away” from ourselves. This heaviness being brought upon us by the wasting of our “powers”, and giving our “hearts away” to “getting and spending” of money and materialistic pursuits. When he says “Little we see in Nature that is ours”, he seems to be saying that the human race has little left in common with the rest of what nature is. He capitalizes the word nature in this line as one would capitalize the word God or the pronoun Him in reference to God. In lines five-seven he uses vivid imagery to portray nature and again uses capitalization with the word “Sea” to illustrate the godly status he ascribes to the realm of nature. Line seven states “The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon” and here Wordsworth uses personification in referring to the sea as “her” to compare our giving our hearts away to materialistic pursuits, the way the bountiful ocean “bares” itself to the barren and desolate moon. We see a fine example of how the poet uses simile during his descriptions of nature as in lines six and seven which state: “ The winds that will be howling at all hours And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;” The winds that he might be referring to here might be the world weariness that makes us feel like the “world is too much with us”, and the “sleeping flowers” might be the people of the world which are still not “awake” from the sleep of religion. (The personification of “Sleeping flowers” could be seeds that haven’t yet become what they could be, much like people who are not yet alive to the beauty of nature and the beauty in them.) In line eight he ties all these thoughts together by stating that for all these reasons and “for everything, we are out of tune;” This line might be a clever way to portray the line itself being out of tune in the way we are out of tune with nature. The lines it is supposed to rhyme with all end in oon, as in moon, soon, and boon. So in making this line slightly out of synch in this way makes it out of tune with the rest of the poem. This might be an interesting way of using the structure of the poem to help convey his point. With the next line we see a subtle shift in the feel and rhyme structure of the poem. It becomes less descriptive and a new rhyme scheme begins which separates verses nine-fourteen from the rest of the poem. Verse nine reads, “It moves us not.-Great God! I’d rather be”, followed by another line which states, “A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn:” At first reading, “-Great God!” might seem like an exclamation, but when we close read this line it can be interpreted differently. By inserting the words “I’d rather be” where he does he alters the meaning. It seems as though it was a coy way of being blasphemous in a time where religion had a tight stranglehold on society. The line that follows is yet another sly reference to religion, “suckled on a creed outworn” seems to refer to a youth indoctrinated by the “creed” of religious literature. In Paganism, nature itself is equated with being a god in itself, and with this in mind we can see how the poet would “rather be” part of that God which would free him of the world which bares such a heavy weight on him. In the last two lines Wordsworth mentions Proteus rising from the sea, and of hearing “Triton blow his wreathed horn”. Proteus was an old man of the sea that could change shape. This could signify the poet’s wish to change his own shape and become an animal or be like the sea itself and in that way closer to being godly. Triton was a sea deity blowing a conch shell, or an instrument. This could be metaphor for the art of poetry or art in general. A musician or an artist creates and is godlike in that sense. In conclusion, no matter what interpretation one makes of this poem it is hard to argue that Wordsworth was against the prevailing religious atmosphere of his time. It is not too difficult to see why he is considered a revolutionary and a Romantic. He was born in 1770, and wrote this poem around 1806 during the conservative Victorian Age in England. Bibliography: Word Count: 872
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