Conquer Selfishness
Addressing one of the world’s worst problems, the poem “The World Is Too Much With Us” tells a great warning. Even being written in 1802, William Wordsworth’s poem still applies to our day and age because of repeating trends. However dark or gloomy the poem got, Wordsworth showed there is light in the end of the tunnel if we heed his warning and do something about it. Seeking to change the norm of our tenancy to be selfish, the poet dared to say the world was out of tune with nature and life itself. The people of the world need to recognize that nature is yelling out to us for something greater than just average everyday living. Warning us to help nature, not trash it or our lives, Wordsworth continues tells
…show more content…
We should be protecting the animals, our eco-system, and for each other, rather than fighting the earth for our own wants. The poet further says that since our world is self destructing, he would rather be a pagan and worship nature, so that way his priority was of nature, not himself. Deeper within the poem, Wordsworth cried out for divine intervention to help our ever falling world because we have given our hearts away to bad things. Besides giving our hearts away, we have also lost our minds into the social dramas of everyday life, and have forgotten about the future because of how comfortable we have become. Warning us how bad the earth has been trashed by ourselves, Wordsworth shouts his warning, accusing us of not being moved by nature, and roars his disfavor without …show more content…
The title “The World Is Too Much With Us” literally means the poet cannot handle the earth anymore because how secular it has become. The “world” refers to the profane part of earth, and “too much with us” just means we have been around it so long we do not even recognize how bad we have become. Furthermore, the tone of the poem is very demanding of it’s reader because of how forced his communication is. Even confusing in some parts, the main message about being too secular comes across directly in every line. Making sure his warning radiated, leaving an impact, Wordsworth said he would rather change his religion to a pagan, so that way he could see something divine going on. Though there are many parts of the poem where great thought has to be put into it, the message is still clear as glass, and the title follows the theme
Wordsworth uses simple language in complex sentences to show how he is so in awe of nature that he struggles to find the words to justify what he is seeing. This is most true following the sighting of the “huge peak”. The regression in adjectives and shows us how nature has transformed Wordsworth’s language therefore being presented as powerful for doing so. Perhaps, the metaphorical meaning of the poem - that as humans there are forces greater than us that many, in our proud, self-centred state of mind, do not realise - is being revealed to Wordsworth and causing not only a change in language but in his views of life. This powerful meaning most certainly attributes power to nature.
Wordsworth questions the amount of recognition that nature gets from people in today society. He almost uses a guilt trip method to make his reader ask themselves if they have given nature the tribute it deserves. When I was assigned to read this text, I found myself so wound up in school and activities and busy work. So much so that I hadn’t had time to enjoy things around me and the things out the window or under my feet. “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!” (page 790, line2) This text approached me at a perfect time to help me to step back and appreciate the small things that surround me each day. Senior year can be overwhelming more than once and it is always a refreshing breath to stop and smell the roses, metaphorically and literally. Therefore, I am thankful for the impact that this text had on me and the timing of its
As Wordsworth highly values nature, he also believes society is flawed and that society is corrupting nature as well as its natural beauty. Wordsworth suggests that people need to connect to nature and those who part from nature will be “out of tune” (8). “I discovered more distinctly the black sides of Jura and the bright summit of Mont Blac . . . the sky and late are blue and placid.” (Shelley 78)
Multiple actions of lying and deception can lead to horrific consequences changing the lives of family, friends, and one true love. In the play, “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare, two teenagers meet each other and instantly fall in love. Their families not only don’t get along, but actually loathe each other. The boy, Romeo, is a Montague and the girl, Juliet, is a Capulet. Throughout the play they try everything they possibly can to be together. Romeo ends up being banished from the town the two lovers live in because he killed a man named Tybalt. This causes Juliet to become upset and take actions that lead to life alerting events. She ends up faking her death causing Romeo to kill himself, which leads Juliet to taking her own life. In the end, the two lovers are no more. Who is to blame for the two teenagers tragic ending? Juliet’s selfish actions brought about the unnecessary death of Romeo and herself.
With a prior appreciation of nature, Wordsworth took this appreciation to another level as he obtained a great interest in scenery and the countryside. Adding sensibility and imagery to his works, his reader could gain a dominant amount of culture from his writings. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s most famous and introductory works on the course of nature are allegedly owed to growing up on William Wordsworth's romantic approach and nature and the beauty of it all. “Nature” has said to have been the finishing product of Wordsworth’s beginning poems. Becoming more conservative as time went on, William Wordsworth only found tranquility in writing and nature as events in his life took a turn for the worse.
William Wordsworth's poem The world is too much with us is a statement about conflict between nature and humanity. The symbolism in his poem illustrates a sense of the conviction and deep feelings Wordsworth had toward nature. He longs for a much simpler time when the progress of humanity was tempered by the restriction nature imposed. Wordsworth is saying in this poem that man is wasting his time on earth by not appreciating nature around him. He is looking but not beholding. "We have given our hearts away" (4) means that we have sold the part of us that is from the earth (man which is from dust) in order to make other things more important than appreciating life; such as, money or
With possessions and machinery such as iPods, GPS systems, advanced voice-recording, photo-shooting, video-taking cellular phones, one can securely say that the present world is fully consumed by materialistic goods and behavior. Society has gotten so caught up with flaunting their valuables and questing to unearth more that they have completely forgotten to slow down and simply savor nature. In his poem, “The World is Too Much With Us,” William Wordsworth displays an ignorant world in a constant quest for material possessions and so the betrayal of society’s denizens to their beautiful natural resources. On the contrary, in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," by William Butler Yeats, the speaker describes how one can obtain peace through nature
In William Wordsworth's sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us" the speaker conveys his frustration about the state in which he sees the world. Throughout the poem the speaker emphatically states his dissatisfaction with how out of touch the world has become with nature. Typical of Italian sonnets, the first eight lines of the poem establish the problems the speaker is experiencing such discontent about. Subsequently, the next line reveals a change in tone where the speaker angrily responds to the cynicism and decadence of society. Finally, the speaker offers an impossible solution to the troubles he has identified. Through each line, the tone elevates from dissatisfaction to anger in an effort to make the reader sense the significance of
William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” carries a very strong message about the conflict between nature and modern development. People are becoming more and more attached to man made items while nature is often ignored and harmed due to the effect man made products like the pollution of factories, cars etc. The ideas of this sonnet does not only serve in the time period that it was written in but serves as a reminder of how corrupt human development can be, and can easily be related to
In “The World is Too Much With Us”, William Wordsworth accuses human evolution to have lost its connection with nature. In the first line Wordsworth says, “The world is too much with us" this phrase likely meant that the world is too full of humans who are losing their connection to divinity and even more importantly, to nature. The speaker tells the reader that everything in nature including the ocean and the wind is in synch with each other, but mankind has fallen away from this connection and is now “out of tune." Humanity has become an inconvenience to the world because we are out of harmony with nature. Wordsworth explains that people, through their consumerist lift styles, can no longer identify with the natural world and have lost their
The nature of mankind is inherently selfish. Every action one takes is in their best interest, making decisions with the intent of benefitting themselves in the end. This selfishness is seen in all people, even if some do not realize. Selflessness is just an illusion. One may think the actions they choose are based off of pure intentions, but in the end they still gain personal benefaction in some way. Selfishness is a built in instinct. People need to survive and are constantly looking for ways to do so. One common strategy is compromise. People cooperate not to appease the other side, but to get the most out of the situation for themselves. Compromise, although seemingly for the good of the people, is overwhelmingly based on self-benefit. People are smart enough to know that without cooperation, they could end up with nothing. This strategy maximizes one’s own success.
Based on the poem The World is Too Much with Us by William Woodsworth, I created a media presentation to mirror the idea of the desensitized point of view of humans towards nature that Wordsworth hits on. He succeeds in portraying humans' dire need for materialistic items over the life of nature through various poetic devices that add to the poem's style, content and structure.
William Wordsworth was a very well-known English Romantic poet in the mid 1700-1800’s. He was believed to have written “The World Is Too Much With Us” in 1802. The Industrial Revolution was up and running during that time, which influenced his writing. Clearly, the reason he wrote this poem was due to the fact that during that era the Industrial Revolution was up and booming, and material possessions and physical appearance was more important and valuable than society’s spiritual values. At the time of the romantic period several poets involved and expressed their internal emotions for nature, and its indulgence.
The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth is an italian sonnet, with the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a-c-d-c-d-c-d. The first eight lines make up an octave and the last six a sestet. Wordsworth bemoans the state of humanity, lamenting that people are too materialistic and they cannot appreciate the beauty of the natural world. He thinks that humanity is too obsessed with their world, the commercial, industrial world, “The world is too much with us”. People are consumed by the pursuit of wealth, while they lose touch with nature. Even as he stands, looking out onto the tranquil sea, he doesn’t feel any connection to it. Here, at the end of the octave, the poem takes a turn. The first eight lines are composed almost entirely of long,
“The World Is Too Much with Us” represents societies absent connection with nature. Right off the bat, Wordsworth repeats the title of this poem to emphasize a Romantic element. The first couple of lines begin with Wordsworth stating that the modern world is losing the battle to materialism. "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" (Wordsworth 2-4)! In an