[1338] The World is Too Much With Us

Guest poem sent in by Mallika Chellappa <mchellappa@>

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-gather'd 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.

 	-- William Wordsworth

I was reading Edna St Vincent Millay's Sonnets
on Minstrels (lovely) and remembered this famous one.

Wordsworth laboured his poems, but just one phrase
makes this one worthwhile for me - a  picture
of the quiet winds over the ocean on a moonlit night.

I studied in a Convent, and some of us giggled when the line
"this Sea that bares her bosom to the moon" was read
in class. Our English teacher - a nun - admonished us
"You silly girls, don't you know a woman's bosom is one of the
most beautiful of God's creations!"

Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty! I'm forever indebted
to Sister Catherine.

Mallika Chellappa

[Martin adds]

Like Mallika, I find this poem a trifle laboured, but the first line has an
indefinable *something* to it. It stuck in my memory long after the rest
of the poem had faded. The transition from the octet to the sestet is very well
handled, too - not always the case in a sonnet, but noticeable when it does
happen.

martin

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