In this holiday week we might well feel, as we read the first line of today’s Petrarchan sonnet by William Wordsworth (1770–1850), that the poet has read our weary minds. Is anybody out there not exhausted? From Thanksgiving to New Year’s, the busyness of the season harries us. It’s winter. People are sick. Bills come due. Even if we haven’t been racing from party to party, welcoming — or steeling ourselves to welcome — various members of our extended families, worrying over gifts and holiday dinner menus, wondering how it is that X number of people can possibly use Y number of towels in Z number of hours . . . let’s just say that at this time of year, for whatever reasons, we can feel, with Wordsworth, that the world is too much with us. In “getting and spending,” we think, we too have laid “waste our powers” and are, “for everything . . . out of tune.”

But our seasonal disconnection from our own inner peace isn’t precisely what Wordsworth is talking about — not precisely. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins a generation later, the patriarch of the English Romantics recoils, in this poem, from the blight which the Industrial Revolution has imposed on England’s natural beauties. Yet where Hopkins, in “God’s Grandeur,” writes that everything about the blighted world “wears man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell,” Wordsworth perceives that blight as an inward condition, a kind of spiritual exile from the ineffaceable intimacy of the created order. The sea may “bare her bosom to the moon,” but the poem’s speaker stands outside that natural relationship. He looks in with yearning on something that still exists, untouched and inviolate.

Where Hopkins’ speaker perceives the natural world as straightforwardly sacramental, “charged with the grandeur of God,” Wordsworth’s can only wish that he believed something that would re-enchant the world. And perhaps, in our paradoxical experience of the season — hastening to get through it, but longing to perceive, and to linger in, whatever is beautiful about it — that’s really what we yearn for. Perhaps, after all, the poet has read our weary minds. 

The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.