The World Is Too Much with Us analysis

The speaker says “getting and spending” has wasted human powers and severed people from nature.^[1]

The sestet imagines pagan myth as a desperate alternative to modern indifference.^[2]

Economic language—getting, spending, giving, and boon—makes feeling sound like something traded away for material gain.^[3]

Proteus and Triton represent an imaginative world in which natural power remains spiritually legible.^[4]

• Materialism and spiritual loss

  Commerce has become a way of life that consumes attention and emotional power.^[2]

• Humanity and nature

  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The winds that will be howling at all hours,

  Nature remains vivid; the failure is human responsiveness.

• Imagination and belief

  Myth makes the sea and wind newly visible as living, meaningful forces.^[4]

This is a Petrarchan sonnet: an ABBAABBA octave turns toward a CDCDCD sestet.^[3]

Its predominant meter is iambic pentameter. The octave diagnoses alienation; the sestet turns to an impossible imaginative solution.

• Personification

  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The sea becomes a living presence rather than a resource.^[3]

• Simile

  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

  The invisible winds become organic and temporarily still.

• Classical allusion

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

  Myth restores wonder to a landscape modern people fail to feel.

Wordsworth wrote the sonnet around 1802–04 and published it in 1807 during the Romantic response to industrialization and commerce.^[2]

Its “getting and spending” critique turns the period’s commercial transformation into a crisis of attention and feeling.^[3]

• “the poem describes it from three angles: economic, spiritual, and cultural”

• “The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.”

1. Academy of American Poets
2. LitCharts
3. Poetry Lovers’ Page
4. Poem Analysis