Paths of Progress:
Commerce and Industry through the Eyes of a Poet

Industry and commerce are necessary evils in a modern world and it’s hard to imagine life without them. But there was a time that widespread industry and commerce was fairly new. Some of the poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addresses this change. “September 1913”, “God’s Grandeur” and “The World is too Much With Us” are all poems that convey a feeling of loss; they all also seem to suggest that it is man’s growing obsession with money and industry that has created a separation from what matters.

All three of the poems describe industry as dreary and dirty. In “The World is Too Much with Us” Wordsworth writes, “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!” The words ‘getting and spending’ suggest a repetition; that this is something that happens day after day after day. He describes the fact that man has given his heart away for this “progress” as a ‘sordid boon’ – or a filthy gain. In “God’s Grandeur” Hopkins echoes the same sentiment; he writes, “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;/ And all is seared with trade; bleared smeared with toil; And wears men’s smudge and shares men’s smell. This poem, being written sixty-some years later, creates a bleaker image of what man’s “progress” has done. After many years man has managed to soil all with their filthy gain; everything has been affected by industry. Nearly forty years later Yeats wrote “September 1913” which focuses more on the monetary side of commerce:

What need you being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yeats also describes industry as monotonous and dirty with the second line in this stanza; the words ‘fumble’ and ‘greasy’ lend to this idea and echo Wordsworth and Hopkins. The next line, however, suggests a level of obsession with money that the other two poems do not.  

                These three poems, while they do all express frustration with the path of progress, differ in how they portray the thing that was lost and in the reconciliation of this loss. Wordsworth expresses this loss as a disconnection from Nature; he personifies the Sea and the Moon, an indication that they are important to the speaker and of them writes, “For this, for everything we are out of tune.” Man has lost touch with the nature and to reconcile it we must return to nature—which the Wordsworth does when he expresses his desire to return to a more pagan lifestyle. Hopkins, being a man of God, would naturally feel that it is God whom with man has lost touch; he writes “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” For Hopkins, nature and God are one being; God is in everything. And God, being all powerful, will take care of Himself and man; at the end of the poem he writes, “And for all this, nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Hopkins’ reconciliation suggests that no matter what man does , God will always be a present force, bending over his creation in protection. Yeats’ poem suggests that there is a kind of separation from ourselves; that mankind has lost what it means to be “man”; in the above stanza he mentions that men were “born to save and pray” and repeatedly says “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”; there is a sense that man has fallen too far to bring themselves back and there does not seem to be any real resolution. The final lines of the poem read, “They weighed so lightly what they gave./ But let them be, they’re dead and gone,/ They’re with O’Leary in the grave.” Yeats’ poem reflects the disillusionment that the whole world was experiencing at this time in history; he is mourning the loss of a past and simpler time, and at the same time expressing frustration with the greed and death that man’s obsession with industry has caused. The subject – the evils of industry and commerce – is the same one that Wordsworth and Hopkins addressed in their poetry, the difference is the lack of reconciliation.