Wordsworth's Italian sonnet is the Romantic cry of a speaker who wants it both ways: he wants to be a pagan, yet still retain his enlightenment values.
William Wordsworth’s Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet “The world is too much with us,” involves an octave that delivers the problem—the world is becoming too materialistic, and the possible solution which is a mere fantasy— if only I’d been born before this materialistic mind-set took hold. The poem consists of an octave with the rime scheme ABBAABBA, and a sestet with the rime scheme CDCDCD.
The Octave - “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”
According to this speaker steeped in the romantic notions of nature as god, the world has become too much for us because we are so busy working to get money to buy things that we have little time for nature and our souls. The credulous speaker asserts, “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Yet, the speaker still has the power and the heart to recognize that “This 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.” Such an observation and the ability to express it so gracefully belies the next complaining line, ”For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”
There are always those who are “out of tune” with nature and the spiritual life, and even before the onslaught of the dreadful "Industrial Revolution," there was the process of getting and spending, and most of the getters and spenders would have been oblivious to nature and would have failed to walk a spiritual path. But the speaker is upset that the factories being built to make needed items are blighting the natural world and occupying too much of the individual’s time. Therefore, he sings his little song decrying the revolution.
The Sestet – “It moves us not. —Great God!”
The speaker shouts that nature, the Sea, the moon, the winds do not any longer have the ability to stir men’s souls as they once did, and the speaker wishes he had been born during ancient times. But, of course, the speaker has only experienced these ancient paganistic times through reading and studying books. He wishes he could have been a Pagan who was raised to believe that he could see “Proteus rising from the sea.” And if he had learned about the Greek gods instead of learning about Christ, he would have been able to “hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
Although the speaker’s wish is absurd and illogical, the reader can understand his complaints and realize that his romanticism blinds him to logic. And who can argue with the wishes of another, even when we see how distorted they may be? Such a speaker as the one of this poem still professes a pride that is unmistakable: he is learnèd as he would never have been as pagan, and his cry to “Great God” demonstrates his own true spiritual path that is grounded in post-enlightenment Christianity.
Other article on Wordsworth: "Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Duty’"
