The Way Technology Has Changed Man: Hopkins And Wordsworth

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"Where do you want to go today?". We all know this slogan of the most advanced software company in the world, Microsoft. The question we will soon have to answer is were we can't go today. William Wordsworth, a quaint man from the late 18th century and early 19th century, understood the need for change in this world and expressed a pre-mature concern for the future that still applies to this very day in "The world is too much with us". Gerald Hopkins, a poet from the later 19th century, expressed many of same ideas and philosophies as Wordsworth in "God's Grandeur". Their main points were that man's continuous journey towards the future has led us to forget our roots.

Though how could two poets from two different lifestyles, Wordsworth the revolutionary and Hopkins the Jesuit, come up with the same basic ideas? They both showed that our continuous journey towards the future has led us to forget our roots as shown by our destruction of nature, by the way the Industrial Revolution has torn us away from our harmony with nature and by the ways we can return back to mother earth.Man continues to destroy nature in an attempt to strengthen himself. Wordsworth and Hopkins talk about man's primal instinct to destroy what is around him. Ironically our destruction of nature leads to the advancements in our personal technologies.

This is made evident when Wordsworth says "getting and spending we lay waste our powers." While it is obvious is that Wordsworth thinks we have become to attached to material goods, what does he mean by "lay waste our powers"? Perhaps the only explanation we can give is that Wordsworth believes that Man has, somewhere deep down in him, the ability to be a creator, an architect who can use nature and not abuse it. He also believes that Man keeps destroying nature without realizing the effects this adds to our lives. Hopkins shows this same type of idea but with a higher connection, the power of God. He uses God as a way of showing us the wrong we are doing. He shows Man's disobedience of God as a way to show that we have forgotten nature.

Wordsworth thinks our own ambitions have led us to this point and we can't say that Hopkins completely disagrees with that. Hopkins shows how nature accumulates our pollution. They both must have realized the influence these technologies were having on their societies.

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