On a beautiful evening, the speaker thinks that the time is “quiet as a Nun,” and as the sun sinks down on the horizon, “the gentleness of heaven broods o’er the sea.” The sound of the ocean makes the speaker think that “the mighty Being is awake,” and, with his eternal motion, raising an everlasting “sound like thunder.” The speaker then addresses the young girl who walks with him by the sea, and tells her that though she appears untouched by the “solemn thought” that he himself is gripped by, her nature is still divine. He says that she worships in the “Temple’s inner shrine” merely by being, and that “God is with thee when we know it not.” This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; “The world is too much with us” takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). In this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDEDEC.
