The World is Too Much With Us — Wordsworth

Model Answer: "Getting and spending" refers to the economic activities of earning and consuming — the twin engines of commercial life. "We lay waste our powers" means we exhaust and squander our deeper human capacities. The "powers" referred to are spiritual, emotional, and perceptual faculties — the ability to perceive nature's beauty, to feel its presence, to experience wonder and communion with the natural world. By devoting all energy to commerce, these deeper capacities are neglected and atrophy — "laid waste" like a field left uncultivated. The implication is that commercial society has impoverished human beings spiritually even as it has enriched them materially.

Model Answer: The Sea "bares her bosom to the moon" — a deeply intimate image: the Sea is a woman, exposing herself to the moonlight. This personification transforms nature into a living, feeling, communicating presence. The Winds are personified as "howling" (expressive, vocal) and then "up-gathered... like sleeping flowers" (calm, folded, contained). The simile of sleeping flowers adds another layer: even stillness is alive, purposeful, beautiful. What Wordsworth reveals is his conviction that nature is not merely matter or scenery but a presence — active, expressive, intimate. The tragedy the poem documents is that humanity, absorbed in commerce, no longer perceives this presence. The magnificent natural world goes through its motions — Sea baring her bosom, Winds howling and sleeping — and we are unmoved: "It moves us not."

Model Answer: "Out of tune" is a musical metaphor. In music, instruments must be tuned to play in harmony with each other; an out-of-tune instrument cannot participate in the music, cannot respond to the other players. Here, nature (Sea, Winds) plays its music — its rhythms and voices — and humanity should be a responsive instrument, attuned to these rhythms. But commercial preoccupation has de-tuned the human instrument: we cannot hear or respond to nature's music. "It moves us not" is the result: nature's most magnificent performances leave us cold. The metaphor is apt because music requires both a player and a listener — and Wordsworth laments that humanity has ceased to listen.

Model Answer: The poet prefers to be a Pagan not because he has abandoned Christianity or reason, but because the ancient Pagan worldview preserved a direct, spiritually alive relationship with nature. A Pagan "suckled in a creed outworn" — raised from childhood on beliefs that personified natural forces as gods — would see the sea as divine, the winds as voices, the world as alive with spiritual presence. Standing in a simple meadow, such a person might glimpse Proteus emerging from the waves or hear Triton's horn — experiences of nature as communicating, responsive, sacred. The "civilised" person, shaped by commercial values, has traded these experiences for material prosperity and is "forlorn" — spiritually desolate. Wordsworth's preference is a measure of loss, not a literal prescription: what he mourns is a mode of perception that industrialisation has made unavailable.

Model Answer: Proteus, the shape-shifting sea prophet, symbolises nature's dynamic, mysterious, always-changing quality — its refusal to be fixed or fully known. Triton, blowing his conch horn, symbolises nature as a voice — communicating, calling, speaking to those who can hear. Together, they represent nature as a living, expressive presence — not merely physical matter but something that speaks, changes, and reveals itself to those with the perceptual and spiritual capacity to receive it. Their invocation at the poem's close makes the final two lines feel like a vision: the landscape suddenly inhabited by divine presences, making the poet "less forlorn."