WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: The World is Too Much With Us- Bethink Your Creed

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

"Creed" is a concept that's often neglected in our day and age, as many nonreligious thinkers consider the idea of creed archaic or limiting. However, everyone has one; your creed is the set of principles that governs your life, whether you recognize it or not. Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us" indicts his generation's creed of materialism, which drives them to pursue gain and forget their origin: Nature.

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading Wordsworths The World is Too Much With Us, which portrays an industrial world that has lost connection to nature. The poet uses the octave to lay out his generation's corruption through excessive worldliness and pursuit of wealth, and to show that his society has become distanced, its very origin, nature. The Volta introduces the idea that a return to spirituality, even

of the pagan variety, is preferable to the belief system of the age. Thus, Wordsworth makes creed the crux of the sonnet. He implies that a creed that recognizes mankind's natural origins should replace his society's materialistic creed. In the Volta, Wordsworth establishes the profound importance of a society's creed by using maternal imagery. claiming that he'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn. The use of suckled implies infancy, as only a child not yet ready for solid food has need of being suckled. The child then needs a creed to survive and to grow.

The preference wordsworth gives to the pagan creed, which he recognizes as outworn, indicts the materialist creed of his generation. If even a belief system passed its prime could do a better job of nourishing man than materialism, than materialism fails to sustain man's spirit. In this way, the poet places man in a position of radical dependence on his creed in order to live well. The creed is in the place of the mother who suckles the infant.

This makes mankind the infant. The way Wordsworth portrays himself a grown man, and by extension all other grown men as a helpless dependent child, may have shocked the men of his age. After all, as utopian political movements rose up across the globe and industrialization began to make England a potent world power, it would have been difficult to see mankind as vulnerable. However, Wordsworth shows in the octave that society is not progressing,

but instead going to waste. What society views as worthwhile pursuits are in fact worthless and immature. When Wordsworth invokes the image of mankind, being suckled by a creed then, he is calling for mankind to return to infancy and learn everything anew. With all that said, let's dive in. The world is too much with us by William Wordsworth. 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 bears her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours, and are upgathered 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 than a creed outworn.

So might I, standing on this pleasantly, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of proteus rising, from the sea, or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following the Poetry Fix on Spotify or Apple podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to the Poetry Fix at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins.