# The World Is Too Much with Us analysis

The World Is Too Much with Us — William Wordsworth (1807)

Wordsworth’s sonnet argues that commercial life has made people spiritually numb to the living power of nature.

Full text from [The World Is Too Much with Us](https://poets.org/poem/world-too-much-us). Public domain in the US (Published in 1807 and public domain in the United States.).

## Summary

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

```
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;
```

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

## Meaning and interpretation

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

```
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;
```

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

## Themes

### 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]

## Form and meter

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.

## Literary devices

### 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.

## Historical context

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]

## What critics say

> “the poem describes it from three angles: economic, spiritual, and cultural”
>
> — [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-wordsworth/the-world-is-too-much-with-us)

> “The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.”
>
> — [Poetry Lovers’ Page](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/wordsworth/the_world_is_too_much_with_us/literary-analysis)

## Common questions

### What is the main meaning?

Commercial life has made people spiritually numb to nature and imagination.

### What are the themes?

Materialism, alienation from nature, spiritual loss, and mythic imagination.

### What form does it use?

A Petrarchan sonnet in predominantly iambic pentameter.

## References

- [Academy of American Poets](https://poets.org/poem/world-too-much-us)

- [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-wordsworth/the-world-is-too-much-with-us)

- [Poetry Lovers’ Page](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/wordsworth/the_world_is_too_much_with_us/literary-analysis)

- [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/william-wordsworth/the-world-is-too-much-with-us/)

## Open the editor

Write with this poem’s meter in the editor: https://lyriic.com/write/iambic-pentameter