Man’s materialism and greed that are carried out at the expense of nature have not changed from 19th century, as seen in William Wordsworth’s poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1807), till now that man is already in the 21st century. Man’s unnecessary, profligate, and irresponsible consumption has been continually depleting the finite resources of nature.

Society’s culture of ‘getting and spending’ in pursuit of material wealth and comfort in Wordsworth’s world of 19th century rural England is as much the same as the culture in today’s 21st century America. The only difference is that nature from which man extracts resources is now depleted. So, the natural world has changed but people’s attitude and behavior have not.

Nature and man’s materialism have always been in conflict – with nature at the losing end. We have been insensitive to the goodness and abundance of nature in our materialistic pursuits. Man is not at awe with nature anymore. He just sees it as a tool to help him towards materialistic success. If ancient people, even the pagans, were steep in some mysterious mythological communion with nature, today’s man is totally unmindful of the sensitive role that nature plays in our lives.

The “World Is Too Much with Us” talks about modern man’s misplaced spiritual link with nature. What used to be is now just found in memory. The poem’s images and metaphors are a sum total of the poet’s impassioned opinion on the theme of man’s relationship with the natural world. For Wordsworth, the progress of man is fatalistic that it costs the existence of nature itself. Modern progress and nature are destined to be in conflict.

For Wordsworth, man is brought up on a destructive lifestyle that starts him out on the perfect potential of nature, but eventually leads him into the harmful ambitions of adult life. The poet’s world is the Industrial Revolution where he saw the ill effects of a monumental step in mankind’s history. He saw the harshness of the Industrial Age and predicts that man will destroy nature. Two centuries later, today, Wordsworth’s prediction rings true. Man’s materialistic ambitions of the Industrial Revolution are translated into today’s greed and ignorance of the finite realities of nature.

Wordsworth accuses the modern age of having lost its precious connection to nature and everything that can lay meaning to this potentially constructive relationship: “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” (2-4). Adults are simply engrossed in the material value of things and possessions: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers (2). Man has exploited nature as a commodity even if he should not and, on the contrary, should in fact coexist with mankind: “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon” (4). Nature, in all its innocence and purity, is helpless in the face of man’s destruction of it, and that no meaning can be found any more in man’s materialistic lifestyle: “The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;/The winds that will be howling at all hours” (5-6). Man does not even
recognize the destruction he wreaks upon nature: “For this, for everything, we are out of tune;/It moves us not.–Great God! (8-9).

The last lines of the poem point to Wordsworth’s observations that if he had the same faith on the ancient and pagan gods and sees the world based on a purer vision, this faith might make him less depressed with how the world has turned out to be. That ancient belief can make him see the world in a different light, far purer and cleaner than the vision of man in the Industrial Age because pagans worship nature and hold it in awe and reverence.

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