Dear Santanta: beset as you clearly are this summer morn with intimations of mortality, I thought perhaps … Wordsworth’s Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood … ?
this is just the first stanza …
Intimations of immortality
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 the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; –
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there has passed away a glory from the earth.
William Wordsworth
… more later …