This sonnet is one of William Wordsworth’s most well-known short poems. As can be the case with commonly known poems, I can’t remember when I first read or heard it, and so it might seem like it’s always existed, that it’s just there, ordinary in its presence. I’ve been thinking today that the poem’s familiarity hides some strangeness. Let’s look at some of that.

For National Poetry Month this year I’ve been examining poems included in a pair of 1920’s anthologies for children: The Girls and The Boys Book of Verse.  Let’s start by examining context for this poem appearing there. This is not a poem of childhood experience.*  “The World Is Too Much With Us” starts off speaking in an adult’s voice of the weariness of “getting and spending.”  I’d say that inside the pair of anthologies I’ve been looking at this month, this is more intended as a poem a parent would read to their child. Other poems in these books live and report from the world of imagination, a splendid world, which though it may also not be physically “with us” as children, exists in the same way as the thoughts and emotions of the actual world do.

Chords in case you’d like to sing this poem yourself. Another form of participation: As the two 1920s poetry anthologies were gendered, I’m asking my audience to guess if each poem I present this month was in the boys or girls volume. Answer below.

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Do we ever think of Wordsworth’s opening phrase as odd: “The world is too much with us?” Volumes and volumes of poetry are filled with nature poetry telling, seeing, hearing, approaching tasting or smelling, the world. We expect poetry to give us that world-muchness. We’ll get to nature eventually in the second quatrain — though it may not be the nature we’d expect — but this is an example of a leading phrase that should shock or intrigue us: “What do you mean WW? I’m so busy with my adulthood I hardly see the world beyond nearsighted bills and paycheck!” Perhaps familiarity keeps us from feeling any shock at the opening.

There’s an odd idiom to finish off that first line: “late and soon.” Was this a common phrase in Wordsworth’s time, or is it just a make-rhyme? While its variation “sooner or later” is something that everyone still says, in this exact saying it seems to be making the present moment a wider aperture: saying that recently and in my next future this is the way things are — though it’s also expressing the deadlines that press our getting and spending, all that ASAP and overdue.

In reading poetry I’m immediately attracted by the musical impetus prosody brings to the words, but another part of my mind should (eventually, after the word-music has struck me first) trace the actuality of the images. The poem’s second quatrain brings the nature images, one almost conventional, the following one, extraordinary. This poem is so commonplace with us that we think little of this quatrain. “This sea that bares her bosom to the moon” may be an all-to-conventional readymade now, but Wordsworth wants us to see there an offer of vulnerability; and with the other well-worn trope of the moon’s tides, a sense that we will, even if we are “out of tune,” resonate with the pulls of nature. And then the unusual image: this nature is not a slow, predictable rising of a consonant chord. If we think we remember this poem, do we forget the “winds that will be howling at all hours” that are now enclosed inside the petals of “sleeping flowers.” This is Wordsworth’s Blakean heaven in a wildflower. I cannot say what the poem’s composer’s conscious intent was — but as a deep image, the flowers containing the plant’s reproductive features could illuminate that desire and sexuality are a riveting but unreined nature.**

And within the later specific context of this poem appearing in an anthology that might be bought by parents to read to young children, this remarkable — yet little remarked on — image may speak to the howling winds of parenthood.

So, the world of human commerce is too much with us — but nature too may be too much with us — it may rack us beyond our control. Do we overlook that Wordsworth says for everything  we are out of tune, something he writes after a quatrain on the commercial world of work and a quatrain on nature.

The sestet that concludes Wordsworth’s sonnet to my reading is not a grand summation or synthesis, some glorious wish. I read it as saying some rickety, obsolete, altogether false mythology might seem a preferable refuge from this world — its nature and  its business. Proteus and Triton there are not the speaker exalting in neo-paganism. They are “outworn,” and a thing that the poem can only see as plausibly not as bad as the elongated moment the poem has presented. In such a fancy — if bound between covers, the imagination of a childhood book of Greek myths that our anthologists might also offer — we could have powers and a way to shape the world that elude the poem. Over on a bookshelf near me is such a book from my wife’s childhood. In childhood, our imaginations, our fancies, are our superpowers. Us obsolete children, outworn, cannot call on those powers and inveigh them with this world.

I hope I brought out some of those inferences with my musical performance in a poem that is perhaps too well-known to be known today. It was rewarding to take out my nylon-string guitar to record it, the kind of guitar I started on in my 20s. You can hear my performance of “The World Is Too Much With Us”  with the audio player below. No audio player? Is it inside a sleeping flower? No, some ways of reading this blog hide it.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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* One of Wordsworth’s best long poems, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,  is the author’s own brief supporting this division.

**Wordsworth’s romantic life and parenthood has complexities that early biographers excised, including a second family in France, a country England was at war with. One can also summarize that women helped make the poetry his name alone is on, including another famous short Wordsworth poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”  Here’s one condensed account of Wordsworth and those matters. If you’d like to hear this Project perform his famous April daffodils poem, and read what I wrote about it, that’s linked here.

The answers to your gender quiz game today. “The World Is Too Much With Us”  appears in both the girls and the boys 1920s anthologies. Relax busy adults, no one loses points today. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”  is also in both books.