Lesson Plans

Assignment to have been completed: Students should have written a fully developed paragraph to answer this question: How would you respond to the charge that life is too much about “getting and spending” and that “we are out of tune” with what really matters.

Objectives: To practice close reading

Activities:

• A. Collect homework.

• B. Write the following information on the board:

• B. Have one of the students read “The world is too much with us” by William Wordsworth, pp. 682-683 aloud. Ask the students the following questions about the poem. You may use the responses in bold italics to help you gauge their answers.

  • 1. Is this poem an Italian or an English sonnet?

    It is an English sonnet.

  • 2. What do the following words mean?

    • a. boon (4): a benefit bestowed, especially one bestowed in response to a request
    • b. Proteus (13): a sea god who could change his shape at will
    • c. wreathèd (14): 1) to crown, decorate, or encircle with or as if with a wreath; 2) to coil or curl

  • 3. Explain why the poet’s words are more effective than these possible alternatives: earth for “world” (1), selling and buying for “getting and spending” (2), exposes for “bares” (5), dozing for “sleeping” (7), posies for “flowers” (7), nourished for “suckled” (10), visions for “glimpses” (12), sound for “blow” (14).

    Earth connotes the soil and the planet while world connotes people and their institutions.

    Selling and buying connote business, particularly in its essence while getting and spending carry a less neutral, less favorable, sense.

    Exposes connotes something somewhat legalistic while bares connotes something earthy and sensuous.

    Dozing connotes a casual nap while sleeping connotes dormancy.

    Posies suggests a sense less formal, even plebeian while flowers maintains the tone of the poem.

    Nourished sounds technical and even somewhat detached but suckled evokes images of sensuousness.

    Visions are deep and prophetic while glimpses are mysterious and provocative.

    Sound is somewhat archaic in the meaning used but lacks the gusto of blow.

  • 4. How does the octave/sestet structure highlight the poem’s argument? How does the octave almost seem like two quatrains of an English sonnet? (Note the two distinct topics.)

    The essential argument is that the sensitivity of the pagan to nature is superior to the materialism and insensitivity to nature of contemporary Christian Europe - though paganism, in general, is an outworn philosophy.

    The first quatrain contrasts the power of trade with that of imagination. It asserts that the real cost of a materialistic value system is our hearts.

    The second quatrain sets the scene (the seashore at night). He forgoes the generalizations of the first quatrain for evocative images. He uses personification. The trite imagery seems to indicate his failure to be creative.

    The sestet shifts to an expressed desire to be a pagan, but he ends admitting that paganism is an “outworn” belief system. (The mythological allusions are themselves lifted from Christian poets, indicating that the speaker cannot deny his received beliefs.)

  • 5. Discuss how the significant tone shift in the middle of the sestet’s first line leads to the poem’s only enjambment, as if Wordsworth suddenly drops his pattern to talk spontaneously and urgently to us.

    Enjambment is the term for an idea that begins in one line and ends in another with no natural pause at the end of the line.

    Wordsworth gives up on poetic language for more natural language, expressive of the failure of his Romantic imagination to free him from the realities of the modern world.

• C. Analyze the poem’s diction, tones, and meanings.

  • 1. What does the speaker say about the values of his “modern world,” and what do these lines say to us? What does it mean to “lay waste our powers,” and how has such “waste” affected the speaker and his contemporaries? How can a “boon” be “sordid,” and what is our “sordid boon”?

    The speaker believes that material concerns dominate our lives, destroying emotional and imaginative responses to natural beauty.

    The words “lay waste our powers” refer to that destructive force of materialism.

    That “waste” has left them bereft of emotional – or spiritual – expression.

    A “boon” is a benefit bestowed upon request, but the benefits of materialism because their possession corrupts nature and spirit. It is, in other words “sordid.”

  • 2. Identify mythological allusions. What does the speaker wish he could become? What’s the effect of “suckled”? What do Proteus and Triton represent, and how could they make the speaker “less forlorn”?

    The speaker wants to become a pagan worshipping such nature deities as Proteus and Triton. He believes that if he could achieve that goal, he would feel less melancholy and lost.

Assignment for next class meeting: Read “Chapter Four – Imagery,” pages 689-692 in Perrine’s Literature. Do Exercises 1-4 on page 692, NOT the items under Reviewing the Chapter on the same page.