Life & Wisdom Quote by William Wordsworth

A small line with a big bruise in it: Wordsworth stages loss as a visual failure. Not forgetting, not rejecting, but a new inability to perceive what once arrived effortlessly. The phrase doubles back on itself - "have seen" versus "now can see" - compressing a whole spiritual autobiography into a grammatical turn. Experience is presented as evidence, and time as the thief that doesn’t steal objects so much as the faculty for apprehending them.

The context matters: it lands in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", where Wordsworth grieves the waning of childhood’s radiance, that old Romantic idea that early life comes with a kind of pre-installed wonder. He isn’t saying nature has changed; he’s confessing that the instrument has. That’s the subtext that makes the line sting: the world stays luminous, but the self becomes less permeable.

It also smuggles in an argument about modern adulthood. The "things" are deliberately vague, letting readers project their own vanished vividness - a field that once felt mythic, a morning that once looked newly minted. Wordsworth’s genius is to frame this as both personal melancholy and cultural diagnosis: a society organized around utility and habit trains you to see less. The line doesn’t beg for recovery; it records the moment you realize recovery might be impossible, and forces you to sit with what that costs.