Nature Versus Industry in Wordsworth’s Poem

"Coalbrookdale by Night," 1801, by Philip James de Loutherbourg. Oil on canvas; 26 3/4 inches by 41 7/8 inches. Science Museum, London. Public Domain

William Wordsworth wouldn’t have known what to do with the hectic pace of modern life. In 1807, in a poem called “The World is Too Much With Us,” he lamented the encroachment of industrialization on England and its accompanying focus on productivity and making money.

People were becoming blind to anything outside of the fast-paced world of business and commerce, especially the mystery of the bountiful beauty of nature. Surely, he would only increase the intensity of his critique today since the pace of life has amplified greatly since 1807, and even fewer people spend time contemplating the natural world.

Portrait of William Wordsworth, 1798, by William Shuter. Public Domain

The Nature Poet

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an unusual and paradoxical figure. In some ways he advocated change; in other ways he rejected it. A poetic innovator and political radical in his early days, he grew more conservative as time went on. He helped initiate the revolutionary Romantic movement in English poetry, only to be later repudiated by many of the young poets he had inspired, who claimed he'd betrayed the cause.

Wordsworth’s lament over the neglect of beauty in favor of business is a good example of the kind of change he wrought in poetry. As Professor Paul Brians of Washington State University put it, “Wordsworth sought to break the pattern of artificial situations of eighteenth-century poetry, which had been written for the upper classes, and to write in simple, straightforward language for the common man.”

Rather than looking to fantastic or unusual events as the subject of their poetry, Wordsworth and the Romantics contemplated the everyday, mining poetic richness from the common things (especially the natural world), and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. “The World is Too Much With Us” emphasizes the magnificence in things like the sea and wind and flowers—everyday things—that we so often miss, preoccupied as we are with “getting and spending.”

Wordsworth steadfastly opposed the industrial revolution that shuttered people in factories and made efficiency and productivity central societal ideals. Poet Andrew Spacey writes that Wordsworth’s sonnet expresses his “heartfelt response to the demise of the cottage industry and rural way of life, which had been taken over by mass production and factory work. People were no longer in touch with nature.” Wordsworth ascribed this new attitude to “the decadent material cynicism of the time.”

1880: Wason manufacturing company, builders of railway cars, in Springfield, Massachusetts. MPI/Getty Images

Here is the full text of the poem, framing these sentiments in beautiful language and images:

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.

Reviving the Sonnet

The poem is a sonnet with an unconventional rhyme scheme. In “The Classic Hundred Poems,” Professor William Harmon notes that Wordsworth helped revitalize this poetic form of the sonnet after it had been all but exhausted by John Milton the century prior. Wordsworth incorporated both personal feeling and political messages into his sonnets.

Wordsworth begins with the separation that has occurred between humanity and nature. “Getting and spending/ we lay waste our powers” seems to be an indictment of the world of commerce, suggesting that the human soul is made for something more than this, that its potential is wasted on the drudgery of accumulating profit. Wordsworth utilizes the rhetorical device of ecphonesis—an exclamation of emotion—in line four to emphasize the tragedy: “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

The idyllic Dove Cottage just outside Grasmere, England, was the home of poet William Wordsworth. Christine Hasman/CC BY-SA 2.0

After line four, the poet moves into a series of brief but lovely natural images, juxtaposing them with the slog of the business world. He begins with the ocean, which he personifies, much like the ancient Greeks he invokes at the end of the poem. “Sea” is capitalized, like a name, and given female characteristics (a bosom); she is also in communion with the moon. This spirit of communion and personification in the natural world forms the heart of the view of nature that Wordsworth defends.

From water, Wordsworth passes to air, referencing the winds “up-gathered like sleeping flowers.” The notion of flowers sleeping is another instance of personification, and it hints at nature’s latent and hidden power. The feminine rhymes (lines ending on unstressed syllables) such as “hours”/ “flowers” in these lines emphasizes the gentle, delicate beauty of the natural world, which does not impose itself on those who are unwilling to look. Rather, it bares itself to those who wish to see. But, Wordsworth says we don’t wish to see it—we are “out of tune” and “it moves us not.”

In the final lines of the poem, Wordsworth turns to those who’ve allowed themselves to be moved to awe by nature: the ancient pagans, especially the Greeks, for whom nature was mysterious and alive—personal, even. To them, nature was not a set of passive or inert laws of motion or biology, but an active force animated by powers unseen, though occasionally glimpsed.

"The Return of Neptune," circa 1754, by John Singleton Copley. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

The speaker of the poem would almost adopt their religious creed since it, at least, recognized the mystery of nature, its unaccountable energy and variety, and saw in it higher presences. Wordsworth references Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea in Greek mythology, who had the power to take different shapes and utter prophecies. Triton was the son of Neptune and could calm the seas with his conch-shell horn.

Was Wordsworth thinking of the stormy seas he saw ahead in the industrial revolution, calling for a revitalized appreciation of nature to calm it? We can’t know, but one thing remains certain: The sudden shift into a mythological reality is a potent finish to the poem, and the image of Triton’s hoary head bursting from the foam and setting his lips to the horn for a long, melancholy note, echoing over the waves, is a haunting one.

In the Greeks and in Wordsworth’s poem, there is a paradox: While Proteus and Triton aren’t literally rising from the sea; at the same time, in some sense, they are—but only for those with eyes to see. Such is the power of poetry, making the impossible possible and the invisible visible, giving, as Shakespeare wrote, “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”

At their best, both mythology and poetry, make more apparent the deeper essence of things, like the sea or the winds. We need poetry like Wordsworth’s to remind us of the value of such things now more than ever, lest we “give our hearts away” to the machine of commerce.

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