Reading Communities

Bouazza Azzouzi

Professor Micheal Rumore

English 302

April 20, 2020

From 1807 To 2020

I have been living in New York for five years since I moved from my original country (Morocco). since then and year after year, I keep discovering and observing a lot of things in the city of extreme as they said. Even sometimes I keep forcing myself to ask questions, where I am? What I am doing here? How did I end up here? Everything seems different for me than the life I was living in my backcountry. However, and after a while, I started getting into the system that drives people every day in the city of extremes as they say. Indeed, I accept this way of living by force of trying to fit myself in a different type of living that focuses more on work and money. In fact, at a certain time, I felt that I lost my true nature in this city. Thus, I decided to change the way I am living, and I went back to school to study English literature. As they say, literature is a reflection of society, William Wordsworth proves that in her beautiful poem called “ the word is too much” (1807)Wordsworth points out the Idea of how people are much consumed with the material world and living nature outside of their thinking.

 Wordsworth is reflecting on her society in the early 1800 century, but her idea still is very related to the way New Yorkers living in their everyday life. He makes a clear point on how people live and how to live become with all these industrial revolutions. “

“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!

This Sea that bears her bosom to the moon,” (1-5) Wordsworth

 Throughout the poem Wordsworth argues that people lost the ability to think of nature instead of following their economic status also he mentions that we have all kind of powers of soul we can use for getting and spending, he’s speaking of materialism means that getting ad spending all that is wasting our happiness, however, we need to go back and connect more with nature in order for us to live a happy life.  He argues that we are too busy with the industrial and mechanical world, therefore we lost our self among these factories. This piece of literature from the early 1800 century is an example that literature can reflect on our societies, and literature has the power to connect the past and present.

   Even if Wordsworth wrote this poem in the early 1800 century, it still has a valid message to be applied to New York now. Because after five years of living and discovering New York,  I can say that people are too concern about time and making money, yes I do not blame them because they are part of the system that values work and work, people are chasing the time in their daily life New York forces people to become machines that never stop and sometimes cannot try to enjoy their relationships. In other words, their souls already dead for making money to pay their expenses

 What William Wordsworth addresses in his poem. “the world is too much for us” I think it was the beginning of world transformation; from time to time becomes worst, complicated and sophisticated until we end up dealing with material life.

Work Cited

Wordsworth, william. Prose and poetry, the prelude. V,1, London 1802.