"the decadent material cynicism of the time." ~ WW
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!
The 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. …
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!
The 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. …
William Wordsworth
The world in 1806? Wordsworth wrote this sonnet from Grasmere, a Lake District village, but was Life Simple? Not in the eyes of Wordsworth. The onslaught of the Industrial Revolution colored Wordworth's bucolic view. Doesn't each generation faces these "wastes to our powers ?"
My mother started reciting this poem today- the year she memorized it might have been 1944- a Simpler time? Pearl Harbor was in the past, a brother was at war, a father died suddenly, a nation of women stepped out of their traditional roles- not so simple.
More than 200 years have past and the words resonate, reverberate to a "sorid boon." The sonnet may seem horribly outdated, I think it beautiful. I hear it today in the dissonant heavy Rap-despised by aesthetes- expressing hostility to Capitalism, the industrial complex. It is all in conflict with the search for Our Beautiful Life-that which defines You.
What defines You? How do you reconcile the quest for the material beauties of man with the quest for the beauties of nature? Do you?
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