I have lived in New York City my whole life. Of course, I visited a lot of other places and visited family in different states, but I never lived anywhere else. One of the biggest things about living in the city is that we do not have an opportunity to always engage with each other or even the world around us. I think that with everything going on with the pandemic and the lockdown, it really gives us a chance to appreciate what is around us. When I think about our current situation, I am reminded of Wordsworth poem The World is Too Much with Us. The speaker in the poem is angry that people do not know how to connect with the world anymore. Our society is solely focused on technology and making money. I think that this is part of our history but also a part of current state and the future. In our history, the world was focusing on advancing that I don’t think that appreciated the world around them much. Given our world today, I am trying to appreciate what’s around me because I never realized it “existed” before. 

            Wordsworth writes “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.” I think the speaker is saying that we have lost touch with the world around us and we don’t see anything anymore. I agree with him because New York is known as a place that is constantly on the move and no one interacts with other anymore. We as people, have lost our connection to nature and what it truly means to live in the moment. This poem sits heavily with me because I live in a city where people are too busy to create relationships with others. I think people are blinded by material things that we can’t find the beauty in what life has to offer us. I understand why the speaker is angry in the poem, we lost what it means to be a human being and we are not fully loving and caring about what is around us. 

            This is very broad, but the poem also reminds me of a movie I watched called P.S. I Love You. The story focuses on a widowed woman who receives letters from her late husband during different times in her life to help her rebuild her life. Each letter she receives in summary, tells her to appreciate what is around and to not be afraid of making connections or building relationships. She wants to close herself and focus on his death and she forgets that there is still a world out there, a beautiful one that is waiting for her. I think that is also what our relationship is like with technology. We are so consumed by it that we forget what it means to build a meaningful connection and have the physical interaction. Unfortunately, we are not able to make that connection with the pandemic, but I think that it allows us to appreciate more of what we don’t have. Reading these poems and books have really meant something to me as a student living in New York City and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to read it.

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