There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

These lines open William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” composed in stages (begun in 1802 and completed in 1804) and first published in 1807. The ode belongs to Wordsworth’s mature Romantic period, when he was reflecting on the contrast between childhood perception and adult consciousness. Written after the intense creative burst of the Lyrical Ballads years, it registers a personal and philosophical crisis: the speaker feels that nature’s former radiance has diminished. The poem responds by seeking an explanation for this loss and a way to recover meaning through memory, reflection, and a revised, adult form of consolation.

The passage laments the fading of a once-transfiguring vision of the natural world. In childhood, ordinary landscapes appear “appareled in celestial light,” as if the everyday were suffused with spiritual or imaginative glory. Adulthood brings a painful disenchantment: the speaker can still see the same objects, but not the earlier intensity of feeling and wonder. The lines dramatize a central Romantic concern—the relationship between perception and imagination—and introduce the ode’s larger argument that the loss is not merely personal but tied to human development. Yet the poem ultimately searches for compensation: if the primal “glory” cannot return unchanged, memory and reflective thought can yield a deeper, steadier kind of insight.