‘Much’, represents the majority or society, and the ‘discerning eye’ represents the speaker itself, or what the minority thinks, and she is looking at what the majority or society is doing or saying, and think that something is very wrong, and she knows that if she agrees or consent with them (majority) she will be consider as sane or normal, but if she disagree she will be consider dangerous and the majority will send her ‘straight to the chains’ meaning that when somebody thinks or does differently to society, society punishes it, because what the majority think always prevails.
According to Emily Dickinson’s poem, on “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Bartleby was viewed as the minority, because he did and says something completely different to what society is used to, he did not follow the rules. Bartleby just prefer not to do or not to respond what he was ask to, and when the lawyer who was part of society try to understand him and ask him for the reasons of his actions, he respond that ‘he prefer not to’.
Having this odd attitude, society punishes Bartleby by isolate him and later sending him to the asylum or prison where he dies completely alone by starvation just because “he prefers not to dine to-day”. And at the end of the story, after Bartleby’s dead when the lawyer finds out about Bartleby’s previous job, as a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, he exclaims: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” meaning that Bartleby was an enigma, a mystery just likes humanity itself.
On William Wordsworth poem “The world is too much with us”, the writer sees himself as the minority. He was too much worried about the materialism he saw in this world. He was the discerning eye, who thought that the materialism and the spending was something terrible wrong for society (majority). He saw how we as society have failed to identify ourselves with nature, and how people did not care about nature and simple things, and he felt very unpleasant seeing how people throw away the most precious gift that life has gave us, to be part of nature.
Because of this thought, the writer feels extremely lonely, and he finds the solution by having those little dreams or glimpses about being and living in older times, when people was more simple and close to nature. That way he feels part of the world, part of society (what majority think) and that way he does not feels so alone.
