thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness.
In the poem Wordsworth castigates the English people as stagnant and selfish, and eulogises seventeenth-century poet John Milton.
Milton's soul, he explains, was as bright and noble as a star and "dwelt apart" from the crowd, not feeling the urge to conform to norms.
[2] In this sonnet, he urges morality and selflessness to his readers, criticising the English for being stagnant and selfish, for lacking "manners, virtue, [and] freedom."
Wordsworth himself implies in a footnote to the poem that it could be read in such a manner, "written immediately after my return from France to London, when I could not but be struck, as here described, with the vanity and parade of our own country .
"[3] The moralism and nationalism of the poem occur simultaneously with and perhaps are the occasion for a call to overthrow the current social and political order, as had recently been done in France.
According to Wordsworth, England was once a great place of happiness, religion, chivalry, art, and literature, but at the present moment those virtues have been lost.
Wordsworth can only describe modern England as a swampland, where people are selfish and must be taught about things like "manners, virtue, freedom, power."