The world is too much with us; late and soon…

The lines open a sonnet, and the complaint goes on: “Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” The sea baring her bosom to the moon, the winds “up-gathered now like sleeping flowers”, move us not; “we are out of tune”. Then the poet breaks out: “Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn”, so that standing on this pleasant lea he might have glimpses that would make him less forlorn, see Proteus rising from the sea, or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Wordsworth wrote the sonnet in the early 1800s and printed it in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, among a group of sonnets on liberty and on the state of England. Its target is the commercial spirit of the age, “getting and spending”, which he saw deadening the sense of the natural world.

The opening has become the standard English phrase for a life eaten up by business, quoted by people who would be surprised to learn that a pagan creed follows.

The World Is Too Much with Us, opening lines, 1807

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work