And space must be found here for the characteristic
sonnet in which the baseness and materialism of modern life drives
him back on whatsoever of illumination and reality lay in that young
ideal.
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. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea:
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Wordsworth's own imagination idealized Nature in a different way.
The sonnet "Brook! Whose society the poet seeks" places him among
the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become anthropomorphic--
men to whom "unknown modes of being" may seem more lovely as well as
more awful than the life we know. He would not give to his idealized
brook "human cheeks, channels for tears,--no Naiad shouldst thou be,"--
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
And hath bestowed on thee a better good;
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.
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