The world is too much with us
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.
The return-to-nature theme always preoccupies William Wordsworth; This poem unsurprisingly features it as well. This essay won't offer a line by line close reading; instead, my focus will be on the final two allusions, Proteus and Triton. I find Proteus’ changeability and Triton’s innate energy to raise the water — as a specific response to the lifeless, unchangeable ‘Getting and spending’, that is, materialism and urban life, according to Wordsworth’s ethos.
Proteus is the god of the sea. He knows everything; though he dislikes revealing it to anyone — unless you can lay your hands on him. To avoid the catch, he would change into different things. This metamorphosis matches the transformative nature of the sea — the frothing waves patter on the voyagers as the amphibians return to the watery embrace. Wordsworth evokes awe, characteristic of Romantic Sublime, a sentiment mixed of beauty, amazement, and secular reverence in the face of nature.
The blowing conch (‘his wreathed horn’) is even more interesting. Triton blows it to raise and calm the sea. This ambivalence points us to both natural wilderness and comforting companionship — a soothing resort from earthly concerns. The horn, in fact, has enriched the auditory image in my first reading. And yet the allusive grandeur of Proteus and Triton is hard to skip. I re-read it and wondered if they actually reveal us more about Wordsworth and the sea.
I think they do. Perhaps Wordsworth is thinking: the sea may roar against the breakwater; but the forceful push and pull is periodical. There will be an end to it. The uncertainty, from which ambiguity inevitably arises, is the very backbone of Romantic Sublime. The feeling that nature may be threatening or soothing preoccupies us all from the dawn of humanity. We all have experienced Romantic Sublime in some way. It is the common experience of humans.