William Wordsworth and Robert Frost Humanity has many given failings, foremost of which is the failure to look past the concrete and acutely relate to the spiritual potential that manifests within. Through the lack of this abstract hindsight, Nature and the Sea are strangers to mankind, open only should mankind return to a direct sense of awareness in its environment. William Wordsworth's poem "The world is too much with us" and Robert Frost's poem "Neither out far nor in deep" both touch upon these human failings. While the themes are generally the same, the methods and imagery called upon to discuss mankind and Nature differ somewhat.

William Wordsworth -- 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 wreathed horn. (Wordsworth, 1888)

In this particular case, Wordsworth's poetry sees Nature as "an emblem of God or the divine" (Brians,...

Throughout the poem, Wordsworth laments humanity's abandonment of the spiritual. Where past humans venerated their natural surroundings, Wordsworth's modern age replaced their Pagan idols with materialism. Mankind had "given [their] hearts away." Wordsworth sees this failing and illustrates this in his poem.
Robert Frost -- Neither Out Far nor in Deep

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass

A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass

Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;

But wherever the truth may be-

The water comes ashore,

And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.

They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep? (Frost, 1936)

The simple rhyming and description in Frost's poem has the outer appearance of a poem about people looking out to sea. However, it is evident that there is a further meaning behind the rhythmic longing of searching for answers out at sea, and at the last stanza, a sense of cruel irony hits the poem. It is a showing of people choosing "between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite" (Jarrell, 1953). There is a reprimand in the first two lines of the last stanza: "They cannot look out far. They…