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An Inspective Look At...

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An Inspective Look At William Wordsworth’s
                                                      The World Is Too Much With Us
                                                                                                                                                                 
Upon the initial reading of Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us one might, as I have, make recall to the colored tradition of the pastoral elegy. It would be foolish to purport that there is a succinct stylistic correlation between the piece and this mode, or that the piece is comparable to the various exemplars of that mode, such as the exalting reverie of Milton’s Lycidas or the impassioned outpour of Shelley’s Adonais, but the specific relation springs more directly from the fact of the poem’s ultimate aim: An elegy on the Pastoral itself. The poem is graced, still, by the imagistic, lyrical pastorales we have come to expect of Wordsworth’s poetics, but is yet more reminiscent (as Wordsworth's sonnets were wont to do by the nature of his impetus for composing sonnets in general, that being namely Milton) of the Miltonic, politic sonnet, with a third aspect interfused among these characteristics: mourning.

The pastoral itself, in the sense of it as Wordsworth’s most transcendent poetical element, is in truth a relatively subordinate feature to the sonnet as a whole. This is hardly a celebrative, messianic glorification of the Mother Earth or of man’s place as her prospector; the imagery is a subliminal stratagem at heart, or at least may serve to such an effect. Wordsworth’s message needs to be properly conveyed unto its partakers, and if this is to occur there must a more primal invocation occurring than a rhythmic rant- you must dip the quill deep and stir a man’s soul, you must put him in the locale of such pastoral charms as you are concerned with if you wish for the message to be related with any efficacy. As such we may look at the imagistic segment of the poem (a solid half with 7 of 14 lines) as being primarily a rhetorician’s methodology for persuasion, and hardly the ultimate concern.

What, then, would be Wordsworth’s ultimate concern? At its most denuded, it would be his ever-present, passionate concern for the wellbeing of his fellow man. As well, in conjunction with this, with Wordsworth we must always remember that he was possessed of a driving inclination that the world should hear what he has to say, that he has some good to confer upon us all. When one juxtaposes this compassion for men with his ultimate belief in his voice one arrives at the conclusion that Wordsworth was, perhaps, trying to reach man. This is, then, beyond a typical elegy in the sense that Wordsworth was on some level playing off a hope for the resuscitation of its topic, that he was reaching a timid finger into the darkness and prodding at it. The sociological sonnet is Miltonic in a more pronounced fashion than that of Milton being a driving impetus, as Milton’s sonorous tonality is there, harkening our averted eyes to shift into the gaze of the speaker, with an interspersal of more Wordsworthian feminine rhymes within the punctuating fullstop often seen in Milton's sonnets that is utilized throughout the majority of the poem - mimicking in turn the sensuousness of the bewailing imagery and the force of the overall message. Wordsworth also shows again his mastery of the caesura, further commanding us to stop with a well-timed exclamation point, beseeching us to look to the heavens and, still yet, to ponder his paradoxical placement of a denouncement of Christian convention with this same godly epithet. It is ultimately one of the more subversive examples of sociological poems in existence: didactic without being overbearing, politic yet cautious, contemplation inciting and emotively evocative, and summed up with a comparative allusion to serve as both a strengthening of his message by drawing on the latent power of mythology, and an endorsement of Earth-worship that voice’s the poet’s pertinent questioning of his readers: Are we so much the better, then, now that we have turned out the old and calculated in the new? With each of these facets in mind I would venture that it is one of the more accomplished original utilizations of Milton to date, if only for his perfect balance of originality and imitation, regardless of whether an individual is of the opinion that the poem is very good or not.

What Wordsworth brings of originality, then, is key to the understanding of the poem. The poem has that Miltonic assertion about it, yes, but could we say it is reprobating in nature? No, and here it will serve us to carefully dissect the multitudes of the poem’s implications: it is both probing commentary and melancholy lament. The emotion ebbs into the poem after the first two lines: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” There it would be a principally pragmatic statement, but slowly the commentary takes on emotion as Wordsworth involves himself in this task, drastically altering the tone to one of sheer mourning. From that bellowed ‘Great God!’ onward Wordsworth appears almost to be wondering aloud how best to cope with a pressing loss, rather than a finger-wag or a fix-it toolkit. Wordsworth instills in this poem the Romantic sentiment, then, with his drear hopelessness, and in this aggregate of intents and interpretations we find the social commentary at a potentially evocative high: the ability to beautifully describe the pastoral in a Wordsworthian manner, but only so far as it may then suffer us with the knowledge of its fall, its loss of sway in the hearts of man through his own logical fettering, and then instead of ministering us that this is a most wretched thing and should be repaired, should be corrected by any necessary means, it plunges into a defeated, personal deluge that does not think even to lecture the next course, but rather persuades you toward feeling the need to pursue that next course, to make you both conscious and motivated to ressurect the Pastoral.

As a matter of course it is to be presumed that the poem may not move anything in us at all, but at least it goes about its task in an accomplished manner, even if it could still be held under the subjective yoke of perception. That Wordsworth has managed so balanced a take on the Miltonic while instilling his own genius in the most effective of ways, whether it be unconscious or no, is reason enough to applaud this poem, I should say.
The poem this discusses can be found here: [link]

By ~NLY
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