The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

Bishop likens the future to a mirror that cannot be read clearly: attempts at prediction yield only a blurred reflection of the predictor. The “old and worried face” suggests that anxiety about what is coming projects itself onto the unknown, so that forecasting becomes less a discovery of facts than a revelation of one’s fears, age, and weariness. The image also implies humility: the future resists confident interpretation, and the more one strains to see it, the more one confronts the limits of knowledge and the psychological cost of worry. In this sense, the line critiques fortune-telling, overplanning, and political or personal certainty, urging acceptance of uncertainty and attention to the present.