The poem “The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth is a sort of an accusation to the people living in the modern age. Wordsworth thinks that modern age people have lost its relationship to nature, thus all things that are meaningful. The anger by the poet can be felt in the lines of the poem. For example, the second line of the poem says “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours.” In these lines, Wordsworth is expressing the things that he is seeing during his time: people not caring about Mother Nature. All they know is how to extract the “juices” from the environment without giving any concern to the effects of the modern age people’s actions. Wordsworth thinks that the connection that was between the people and the nature during the early civilizations has vanished. Wordsworth views the world in which he lives as a world full of people taking advantage of everything they encounter, particularly the environment. This idea can be seen in the line “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
The author thinks that we people does not recognize the beauty of our mother nature and disrespecting her by taking advantage of the environment and not taking care of it. In the lines “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,”. Clearly, Wordsworth thinks that with all the beautiful things that mother nature has shown and given to us, all that we do in return is to be “out of tune” which means that we are doing the wrong thing about our environment. With all the things going on around him, the author of the poem instead wishes to be “A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.” Also, to lessen the burden, he wishes that he could have been born and raised as a pagan so that if he sees ancient gods that takes care of nature, he would have gained spiritual comfort. The desperation of his wish can be seen through his booming “Great God!” Also, Wordsworth lives in Christian England and during his time, normally, one does not wish to be a pagan.
The things that Wordsworth saw during his time can also be seen on our present time. Nowadays, most people do not care about what is happening to our environment: people throwing their wastes on bodies of water; some are cutting trees that are not supposed to be cut; and chemicals that are harmful to the environment are improperly used. As a result, there is the infamous “climate change”. In some countries, heavy rain pours even though the weather is supposed to be hot. Super typhoons and super hurricanes are, I think, are results of climate change. And climate change is the result of the wrong doings of us people for the past years. Now, there are movements to restore the old state of our environment. Although the process of restoring the nature can take mere decades, I think that if the world starts to realize the things that might happen if this problem is taken for granted, then the “lost connection” between the environment and us people will be established again.
