Summary

“The World is Too Much with Us” begins with the speaker lamenting the way in which people in their society are too preoccupied with “getting and spending” that they forsake their ability to see the value that can be gained from nature (2). They claim “we have given our hearts away” in this exchange, sacrificing the ability to appreciate the purity of the earth in order to seek material gains (4). In lines four through eight, the speaker goes on to list the various aspects of the natural world that people in the speaker's present age have come to ignore, primarily the majesty of the sea. “For this, for everything,” the speaker says, “we are out of tune;/it moves us not” (8-9).

In the final six lines of the poem, the speaker claims they would rather belong to a...