Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter de La Mare

Caught in that thin, stingy corridor between seasons, de La Mare’s line makes time feel less like a steady river and more like a door that keeps shutting just as you reach it. “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers” is a miniature drama of missed timing: harvest has passed, bloom hasn’t arrived, and the speaker is left with the bleak inventory of “not yet” and “no longer.” The diction is plain, even domestic, but the emotional payload is adult: a life measured in windows of ripeness, each one brief, each one easy to miss.

It works because it refuses spectacle. Fruit and flowers are not abstract symbols imported from some lofty philosophical system; they’re tactile, ordinary markers of the year. That ordinariness is the trap. You can hear the subtext: I did what I was supposed to do, I waited, I tried to be patient, and still I’ve landed in the gap. The parallel structure turns the line into a seesaw, rocking between two denials. No consolation, no bargain, just the clean accounting of lateness and earliness.

De La Mare, writing in an England shaped by industrial modernity and, later, the psychic aftershocks of war, often builds his eeriness from gentle surfaces. Here the context isn’t a specific event so much as a worldview: nostalgia as weather, regret as seasonality. The line suggests a life spent arriving at the wrong moment, and the quiet terror that the “right” moment may be largely accidental.