Nor his owne vision hands what it doth catch

Shakespeare, Sonnet 113 (1609)

The eye catches but cannot hand — cannot pass the seized object to the mind, because the mind has already filled. “Catch” here is pure capere, physical interception, and it fails. The cognitive version of the same word never arrives: you can seize a sight without it becoming knowledge, because the grasping faculty and the understanding faculty have come apart. The eye is still working; the mind is “incapable of more.” The liminal figure is the eye itself — stationed at the threshold between world and comprehension, doing its job, achieving nothing.