As William Wordsworth, the high priest of Romantic Britain's worship of natural phenomena, wrote: 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!
He wrote movingly that, "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, little we see in Nature that is ours; we have given our hearts away... .. Imagine, Wordsworth wrote these words in the early 19th century, when a day of rest was still part of the social fabric of Western society!
In the exhibition is an edition from 1807 that includes his famous sonnet with the lines: 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.
"GETTING and spending," wrote William Wordsworth, "we lay waste our powers".
William Wordsworth could have been talking about the re-election process when he wrote, "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers".
In any direction we look, we are confronted with a deafening cacophony of fearful statistics and dire warnings and great crises and profound changes that do, sometimes, appear to lay waste our powers.
Although often "derided for its superficial banality," materialism has resulted in "a flood tide of spiritual yearning".Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers".
The poet William Wordsworth once said, "In getting and spending, we lay waste our powers".
My mother recited great poems she had come to know by heart in a vastly different cradle of education — the prairie schoolhouse — where she learned (in elocution class) these lines from Wordsworth: "The world is too much with us / Getting and spending we lay waste our powers".
"Getting and spending," as Wordsworth, the early 19th century poet, put it, "we have laid waste our powers".
