By William Wordsworth (1807)
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!
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.
Originally published in Poems in Two Volumes (1807) by William Wordsworth. Public domain.
Analysis
Wordsworth compresses a cultural diagnosis into fourteen urgent lines. The sonnet’s octave argues that modern commerce steals perception — “getting and spending” wastes the inward powers that once allowed nature to be kin rather than scenery. The volta then makes a scandalous wish: better the pagan who can still behold divinity in waves than the Christian whose imagination has grown thin.
This provocation is rhetorical charity. The poet is not proposing literal conversion but pleading for a recovered capacity to see. Mythic names — Proteus, Triton — are less theology than optics, lenses to magnify the ordinary world until it commands awe again. The sonnet’s music sharpens the rebuke without venom, ending in a call to re-enchantment.
In our century, the poem reads with fresh accuracy: distraction has multiplied, economies have quickened, and the price remains the same — hearts misgiven, powers laid waste. Wordsworth’s cure is not withdrawal but attention disciplined enough to restore value where it begins, in looking.