With all the excessive advances in technology in the past decade, specifically in the social media like Facebook and Twitter, there have been a lot of concerns about us losing touch with the real world. Interestingly enough, even though “The World is too Much with Us” was published over two centuries ago, its theme is synonymous with the same idea of losing touch with nature. Right from the beginning the poet, William Wordsworth, is straightforward about his message. “The world is too much with us” he says “late and soon” (line 1). He points out that it is not just the problem of his time. With “late” he implies that this has happened before; adding on “soon” implicating that it will continue to happen in the future, and evidently, two hundred years later as we can see, he was right.

One way that Wordsworth portrays his sadness about how things are in the present and how they will be in the future is by consistently referencing the past. He uses his imagination and talks about the Greek gods Proteus rising from the sea and Triton blowing his shell horn. With these last two lines of the poem, Wordsworth accomplishes so many things. He draws an image of a simpler time where everyone was so in tuned with nature, such as, a god who controlled the sea and also the people that believed in that god. In doing so, Wordsworth himself is becoming one with nature as he looks across the sea.

Wordsworth does not ignore the fact that the theme of the poem, man versus nature, is probably very unpopular. In fact he acknowledges it. He easily says that he would “rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” emphasizing how terrible the times are now (lines 9 and 10). Although, I agree with Wordsworth, it is after reading his poem that I’ve changed my mind on this issue. I used to think that technology is the reason why we have lost touch with nature, but as we can see from this poem, we have had this problem even before all of these new inventions and ideas. I think what Wordsworth is trying to say is that the cause of this problem is not any worldly thing, but “us” ourselves.