Romantic post 1

"The world is too much with us" by William Wordsworth

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!
The 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 wreathed horn.


A characteristic of Romantic poets, according to the text, is "dreams of a simple, primitive, and uncorrupted lifestyle..." This poem exemplifies that sentiment. Wordsworth tries to express how he feels about the Romantic-era industrial world and the bourgeois atmosphere. He explains how the world has lost touch with nature and uses mythological references to wish for a world where man and nature were one.