The World Is Too Much with Us
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 bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1860)
The rhyme scheme of this Italian sonnet is ‘abba abba cdcd cd’.
The first eight lines decry the state of a materialistic world, a world out of tune with nature. And ‘we’ have given our hearts away – focused on getting and spending. Industrialisation was taking place at the time of Wordsworth. And then that wonderful oxymoron – a sordid boon! And equally today we may well wonder whether economic development is a sordid boon, it being out of balance with the on-going degradation of the environment. The benefit of economic development is being lost by those suffering the devastation associated with climate change.
In the last six lines …
Proteus = an early prophetic sea-god or god of rivers and oceanic bodies of water, one of several deities whom Homer calls the “Old Man of the Sea” and capable of changing into many shapes. And Triton = In English literature, Triton is portrayed as the messenger or herald for the god Poseidon.
The retort from Wordsworth is that he would rather be suckled (nurtured) by a bygone creed which worshiped nature (nature-mythological-Gods). And not sucked in by industrialisation, and for Wordsworth nature was his romantic ‘God’.
my word in your ear 
Not much has changed Rich!