The World Is Too Much With Us Tone

The poem, “The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth creates a tone of disapproval of society through consonance, the poetic form, and his references to religion. The poem is about the speaker being irritated at society for ignoring how beautiful nature is in order to get money and buy things. The word choices Wordsworth uses allow us to see that the speaker disapproves of this behavior. The beginning few lines use consonance to create the critical tone. The speaker says, “…we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours….” This means that the speaker believes the people should not waste their time and energy ignoring what nature has to offer. The t sound in waste, little, nature, and that create a tsk tsk tsk sound, as if the speaker is scolding the others in society for their actions and inability to appreciate nature the way he does. By having that tsk tsk tsk sound, there is from the first few lines already a tone of discontentment about how the speaker believes people are. …show more content…
By being a sonnet, the middle of the poem has a turning point. It happens from lines 8-10 when he says, “…For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; / It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn….” Here he is saying that society is out of tune with nature and it bothers him to the point he would rather have an outdated religion than to not appreciate it. This is the turning point where the poem goes from the discontent tone saying how society is, to how the speaker feels society should act around nature instead. The helps to emphasize the speaker’s discontent tone because by expressing his ideas of how society should act, he is further disagreeing with how they do