William Wordsworth, Sonnet 18 (from Poems, in Two Volumes [London: 1807])

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.

Scholars often point to the nearly identical line Spenser's "Colin Clout's Come Home Again": "Is Triton blowing loud his wreathed horne"  (l. 245).  See, for instance, A. A. Prins, "Unconscious 'Borrowing' and the Problem of Inspiration," English Studies 1-6 (1957) 64.  W.J.B. Owen, in the Spenser Encyclopedia, suggests that the line is a tacit allusion, or a quotation Wordsworth intended to be noticed by those familiar with Spenser's work.  Wordsworth's sonnet, however, is far more about "hearing" the voice of the pagan sense of divinity than Spenser's allegorical shepherd's lament for the imprisoned Walter Raleigh's angry queen Cynthia (Elizabeth I).  The editors of The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser spot the Ovidian allusion immediately (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) n. 245, (635).  In effect, Wordsworth is leaping over Spenser's use of Triton's horn to Ovid's in an attempt to reinvigorate English poetics with the spirit of Ovid's imagination.

In turn, Wordsworth's appeal to the authority of the ancient pagans might also have influenced the composition of John Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," a work that describes another Romantic poet enthralled by the classical work's strange energy.