Our Birth

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

William Wordsworth,
from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”