“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;

Turn wheresoe’r I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

 

From Ode: Intimations Of Immortality by William Wordsworth

 

I created our image from electromagnetic data — or Light — reflecting off the surface of a flowering bush. It brings to consciousness wistful memories, a longing for a transcendent life in another zone of reality where colors and forms like these saturate daily life, a vision emanating from innocent childhood experience. I am not missing the kaleidoscope as much as I am hearkening back in some travail toward the first brightening of my life, a part of everybody’s biography, the loss of which William Wordsworth renders so well.

Our poet constructed a profound poem in the English language. It can be read, but it cannot (in my judgment) be fully understood and appreciated by a human being much before reaching sixty years of age. Nostalgia is possible. Melodramatic sentiment leaving you misty-eyed remains available to all ages. However, Wordsworth is talking about something far more subtle and below-the-surface. His last lines make reference to this, and also offer a benediction:

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

   To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”