Poem by William Wordsworth The World is too much us; late and soon Essay

Poem by William Wordsworth The World is too much us; late and soon - Essay Example Wordsworth uses contradictory words together, to describe his anger and helplessness at a world which is being destroyed, and yet progress cannot be stopped. His choice of words to conjure up images and sounds is truly extraordinary, and he uses the rhythm of the iambic pentameter of the sonnet to great effect. William Wordsworth is also known as one of the Lake poets along with his friend and mentor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together they are credited with ushering in the era of Romanticism in English poetry. William Wordsworth was born in the beautiful Lake District of Cumberland, and grew up surrounded by the beauty of nature. These beautiful surroundings nurtured in him a deep and lasting love for nature in all her wondrous moods. He referred to poetry as â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,† originating from â€Å"emotion recollected in tranquility†, yet there was a natural rhythm and poetic form to his poems. (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads) His poem The World is Too Much With Us is a classic example of the many sonnets he wrote. Composed in 1802, the poem was first published in his work Poems in Two Volumes in 1807. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth was deeply disturbed by what he saw as decadence in the form of material gr eed, to the exclusion of everything else. At this time he wrote many poems deriding the materialism of a world that was losing its spirituality, and he urged mankind in most of these poems to find that lost spirituality in nature. The World is Too Much With Us is a sonnet in the Petrarchan style modeled on the work of the Italian poet Petrarch of the early Renaissance period. It is also known as the Italian sonnet, which is a poem of 14 lines. This kind of sonnet is divided into two parts. The first eight lines are known as the octave and the next six lines, the sestet. Each of these parts has a special function in a Petrarchan sonnet. The octave is employed to state a problem or a