Comparing Henry David Theareau And William WOrdsworth

3 Pages 682 Words

While writing from completely different periods, the age of romanticism and the 19th century, Wordsworth and Thoreau withhold strikingly similar ideas in two of their important works. Thoreau’s Walden and Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” both attempt to teach us about the significance nature has on our lives. In Walden, Thoreau actually writes about the lifestyle that he lives in and preaches to us why we should live it also. “The World is Too Much with Us’ is a much shorter piece of writing in which Wordsworth tries to tell us what is wrong with the “modern world”.
Wordsworth and Thoreau talk about and use the word nature many times in their writings. However they are not referring to the misuse of our planets forests, rivers and mountains but rather the misguided nature of the modern man. To begin with, in the opening sentence of The World is Too Much with Us”, Wordsworth is openly telling us we are too worried about getting material objects and spending money. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;” In the following two lines Wordsworth explains peoples obsession with possession, and how we have all forgotten the real meaning to life as we have “given our hearts away”. Thoreau has a similar belief that he proposes in the conclusion of Walden. He writes, “ Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises...Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away”. In these words I think Thoreau is trying to tell us that what kind of stuff and how much of it you can buy with your money really doesn’t matter in the long run. Instead a man should follow his heart and do whatever makes him happy.

The next few lines of Wordsworth’s poem explain to us how life continues to go on no matter what happens. “ The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, the winds that be howling at all hours, and are up-gathered like sleeping ...