How does the poet use irony in the poem, The World Is Too Much With Us?

In several instances throughout the poem, Wordsworth uses irony to present conflicting ideas to the reader. For example, in the fourth line of the poem, he writes, “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” (4). Here he is referring specifically to the way in which humanity has given itself over to modernized industrialization. While this seems straightforward enough, the pairing “sordid boon” is a particularly interesting one. While sordid typically means base or vile, boon means advantageous or beneficial (4). Thus, in saying something is a sordid boon, he is essentially saying it is vilely beneficial. While a seemingly paradoxical idea, such a use of irony perfectly encapsulates the way in which industrialization both made certain aspects of life easier for humanity and more difficult. Later in the poem, the speaker makes an appeal to the Christian God with the utterance “Great God!” in the ninth line (9). A fairly unassuming exclamation, it becomes much more ironic within the context of the line itself, wherein the speaker essentially denounces Christianity in favor of Paganism. Thus, this ironic appeal to God, which is practically a linguistic reflex for the speaker, shows that his desire to remove himself from this society that has become essentially hardwired into his mind is much easier said than done.