“The World Is Too Much With Us” Williams Wordsworth 1801

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!
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,
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 wreathèd horn.
 

I was reading through a book of sonnets when the one above by Wordsworth appeared. It’s an emotional poem and all I could think of was “Poor Wordsworth.”  His love of nature was profound and spiritual-we know that from his poetry.   And here he is, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, trying to regain the transcendent bond with nature that he once had. In the first four lines, he speaks generally for all of us. The world (cities, people) is closing in on us, pursuing repetitious and useless “Getting and spending,” letting our talents go undeveloped, even “given our hearts away.”

     Then, abruptly, he becomes impassioned:

Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn:

so that, once again, there would be “glimpses that would make me less forlorn,” see Proteus “rising from the sea,” or hear “old Triton” blowing into his “wreathed horn.” “Standing on this pleasant lea,” Wordsworth laments the loss of these mythological fictions, inspired by nature, and abhors the urbanizing changes in his world today. He summarizes his thoughts,”Little we see in Nature that is ours;”

 A few days later, browsing through another poetry book, I saw this title, “Disillusionment at Ten O’clock.” It was by Wallace Stevens:

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

Wallace Stevens 1924

When I finished the poem, I felt I had found these two, over one hundred years apart, a romantic and a modernist, in the same mood; different eras, different styles, different intensity, different structures, but the same disappointment with the state of their worlds –1801 and 1924- and the same feelings of loss and aloneness.

Stevens presents his subject directly at the start, as Wordsworth did, “The houses are haunted/ By white night-gowns,” metaphors that tell us that he’s writing about his community, his world. The “white night-gowns” are all the same, and, at night, these ghosts drift through the houses, spreading their aura, and their dullness, everywhere. Stevens, in one eight-word sentence, with simple concrete imagery, creates a heaviness of spirit, as Wordsworth did in four compelling, descriptive lines.

Stevens goes on to give examples of his “white night-gowns” in a mildly mocking tone, “None are green, / purple with green rings, / Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings.” The repetition of the word order and common words, — Or, rings, with—three times, the primary colors, reflect his point that the ghosts in white are without imagination, without life.

In the following four lines, Stevens gives his examples of unfamiliar, somewhat exotic images: “socks of lace . . . beaded ceintures (French for belt or sash) . . .” baboons” coupled with “periwinkles.” Wordsworth, too, gives illustrations in his more elaborative, 19thc. style : “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;” dramatic flourishes of nature, personifying the Sea, the moon, the winds, the flowers.

Now we see that the structures, though one is a Petrarchan sonnet and the other free verse, follow the same pattern: explanations of their discontent; their own examples of lush and imaginative imagery, and, at the end, visions of where this inspiration might still be found.

For Wordsworth, it would be a feeling of union with Nature, here personified by the figures of ancient myth, able to exist and perform in any sphere of the universe, the sea, the sky, the underworld, the earth. Stevens, on the other hand, proposes that possibly an “old sailor,” aged, uneducated, unaffected by today’s society, and unconsciously “asleep in his boots,” would be free to leap out of reality and catch tigers “In red weather.”

The same progression of points, the same pattern of illustration, tempt me to wonder if Stevens, an admirer of Wordsworth, intentionally echoed “The World Is Too Much With Us . . . . “ in his own style. In any case, the similarity between the two poems that please me most is that each poet is extolling the value he feels deeply about. For Wordsworth, it would be Nature; for Stevens, imagination. For both, poetry.