William Wordsworth was best known for his romantic poetry and played a key role in launching the Romantic Age of English literature. Although this ballad may not whisper expressions of endearment, it is still no exception and only the rhetoric is more subtle than his typical works. The sonnet, "The World is Too Much with Us,"" is consumed with a plethora of imagery regarding nature, the senses, feelings, and Paganism. The sonnet is written from a place of trepidation and frustration. The speaker is depressed at humanity's inability to appreciate the things in nature, let alone see them. It is not only humanity's inability to "see" anything in nature that so depresses the speaker, it is also our inability to be moved by it. Such insensibility is, for the speaker of the poem, a sad sight. The poem itself follows the rules of the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet as it contains an octave and a sestet. The poem is an iambic pentameter with the rhyming scheme of ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. While there are a lot of iambs in the poem, there are also several types of beats that give the poem a sense of variety, giving way to some exceptions to the iambic pentameter. .
"The World is too Much with Us"" is obsessed with nature and the central complaint of the poem is that people are so consumed by consumerism that they are no longer moved by nature. The first line is simply stating that the "world is too much with us; late and soon" (1). Either the speaker is overwhelmed by what the world has to offer or he feels that all of the occupants of the world are just too much. Another translation would be that the world doesn't have time for nature because it is too much. A well placed juxtaposition lies in the first line with "late and soon. "It is an inclination to say that this phrase could mean that the world is too much both in the past (late) as well as in the future (soon)." With the second line, we see that the capitalism of this world is wasting us away and destroying us.
