“The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,This is no common waste, no common gloom;But Nature, in due course of time, once moreShall here put on her beauty and her bloom.She leaves these objects to a slow decay,That what we are, and have been, may be known;But at the coming of the milder day,These monuments shall all be overgrown.”

English Romantic poet

William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet. He lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and with Samuel Taylor Coleridge he helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature through their joint publication, Lyrical Ballads, in 1798. His work is closely associated with the rise of Romantic poetry in England, especially through the ideas and tone that shaped that movement. He is remembered for helping redefine English poetry at a turning point in literary history.