W3 Poetry Prompt #190 — Weave Written Weekly
This week’s Poet-of-the-Week is Sally, who challenges us to choose one phrase from Wordsworth’s Romantic sonnet The World Is Too Much With Us and weave it into our own poem. The poem doesn’t need to be a sonnet, but in a nod to the form, we’re asked to limit ourselves to fourteen lines or fewer.
Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us laments humanity’s growing alienation from nature in an age of materialism. He criticises society’s obsession with “getting and spending” and longs for a renewed spiritual connection to the natural world—even imagining pagan gods as preferable to modern disconnection.
Wordsworth wrote his poem in response to the Industrial Revolution, expressing his anxiety about humanity’s increasingly disruptive relationship with the natural world.
Read Wordsworth’s poem The World Is Too Much With Us here
The World Is Too Much With Us’ by Wordsworth
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.
I chose the line “So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,” and wove it into my poem Small Rectangle World: Heads Down.
What follows is my own response to that tension between nature and our modern distractions.
Small Rectangle World: Heads Down
How can we save the Earth from us?
Sirens whining through concreted streets,
Where lurk shadowed crooks, thieves, and cheats;
Heads down, we watch our small rectangle world,
Unaware of what’s to come—to be unfurled.
Face-masked in black to hide their fangs of greed
They steal our phones in gangs—at speed
While we stare at shares and likes all day
On street bikes they snatch our worlds away.
Without my phone I raise my eyes
And see a city pining—for star-filled skies.
I yearn to dream beneath a moonlit tree,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea.
How can we let this be—this muss?
How can we save the Earth from us?
—Lesley Scoble, December 2025
Audio – Small Rectangle World: Heads Down 🎶
© Lesley Scoble. All artwork, poems, lyrics, and songs are my original creations unless otherwise credited. Please do not reproduce, remix, or use them without my permission. I am, however, always flattered, thrilled, and honoured by your kind reblogs.
THANK YOU
Thank you, Sally, for the wonderful prompt.
My gratitude, as always, to David of The Skeptics Kaddish for all the encouragement and inspiration he offers.
And my thanks to you, dear reader, for taking the time to read and listen to my poem.
To discover more about the W3 Poetry Prompt, please follow the link below.
LesleyScoble.com 
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