The bag was just sitting in the room, a leftover from a granddaughter’s birthday event, and there staring at me were words I had learned in High School some 50 + years ago! Words which were first written close to 250 years ago! Here they appear as a marketing ploy for handmade soap. At least the words bear Wordsworth’s name and the dates of his life.. Wordsworth did not have soap or cleanliness on his mind when he penned the poem. Wordsworth was dismayed by those around him who were caught up with greed, power, and worldly wealth, and blind to the beauty that was all around’ them in nature. Further, nature was not to be owned but enjoyed, nature would speak to things beyond the material. He even writes that he would prefer being poor and pagan than to sell his soul to greed. His first plea is to God and then in the last lines of the poem he refers to two pagan gods. Proteus and Triton sea gods. It has been fun revisiting this poem and recalling it in my memory. This is a remarkable poem from the late 1700s which speaks to our plight in the early 2000s. We are ‘out of tune’.
The World
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 wreathèd horn. William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Prayer:
Loving God,
hear our confession.
We have all too often chased after the material things,
believing they would bring us happiness, contentment,
wealth, and power.
Such gifts have become sordid in that we have neglected
the beauty of nature and the meaning of life beyond mere currency.
In the beauty of sunrise and sunset, in the beauty of plants and planets
remind us of the mystery of this gift of life and help us to treasure it.
O Lord,
all around us this ‘getting and spending’ and the
wastefulness of our powers
has brought us to this tragic moment in our world.
Help us, we pray, that soon we might treasure life more than death,
treasure hope more than harm, peace more than war,
friendship more than fear, love more than hate.
O Lord, hear this our prayer. Amen.
Prayers, Poems, and Christian Ponderings 