Poetry Essay - the World Is Too Much with Us Vs the Lake Isle of Innisfree

With possessions and machinery such as iPods, GPS systems, advanced voice-recording, photo-shooting, video-taking cellular phones, one can securely say that the present world is fully consumed by materialistic goods and behavior. Society has gotten so caught up with flaunting their valuables and questing to unearth more that they have completely forgotten to slow down and simply savor nature. In his poem, “The World is Too Much With Us,” William Wordsworth displays an ignorant world in a constant quest for material possessions and so the betrayal of society’s denizens to their beautiful natural resources. On the contrary, in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," by William Butler Yeats, the speaker describes how one can obtain peace through nature and does, in fact, surround himself with his environment to attain such serenity.

Society seemingly gets worse and worse each year by becoming too worldly, and Wordsworth openly criticizes this situation about how mankind loses sight on how significant Mother Nature and her ways are. "The sea that bares her bosom to the moon" (line 5). With this line, the author uses personification and alliteration to set a tone of urgency to show that even the sea, whom is blatantly exposing her bosom to all, goes unnoticed and unappreciated. "The winds that will be howling at all hours, and are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;" (line 6-7). Wordsworth evaluates that even the winds that howled out its throat were striving to get humanity's attention, only to give up and rest "like sleeping flowers," in a subdued manner. With these faults of society, Wordsworth criticizes that mankind has been using the ecosystem for goods for themselves, and not for its beauty. "We have given our hearts away" (line 4), he describes that with this unjust exploit from humankind, they have only given their gentle hearts away in replace with greed for materialistic goods, and he utters about what an awful trade they have made, "a sordid boon!" (line 4). "For this, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not," (line 8-9) Wordsworth uses a somewhat helpless tone to explain that for all of these wrongdoings of humanity, that their situation may almost be too shabby because of their indifference and because humans are not in sync as a group of loving people, but out of tune like lost puppies without a purpose, and beautiful natural aesthetics do not even sway people to care.

In the next six lines, the sestet, Wordsworth proposes an outlandish solution by exclaiming that he would have rather been born as "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" (line 10) than bear to watch humankind abuse the environment in this ghastly manner. A wish to be a Pagan was simply shocking in Wordsworth's Christian England, which signifys the extreme weight of his wish, thus letting the reader see and apprehend his urgency and how much he, in fact, was concerned with the disruption of nature and society's self-indulgence, truly hoping for humanity to regain their spiritual conscience. With the mention of ancient gods such as Triton and Proteus, Wordsworth connects back into the ancient Greek gods who symbolized nature, hoping that reaching out to these gods would relinquish and be saviors to society. With this, Wordsworth hopes for making himself one with the environment by being with the ancient gods and seeing the actions of nature, therefore gaining spiritual solace.

In contrary, Yeats describes in his poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” how nature soothes and how he seeks solace in his environment, away from the corruption of the materialistic world today. Overall, the mood of the tone is rather straightforward, precise, and detailed; the speaker explains, “I will arise and