Why did Wittgenstein think metaphysical claims could not be straightforwardly stated?

In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that metaphysical claims cannot be straightforwardly stated because of his "picture theory of meaning".12

According to this view, language is meaningful only when it functions as a "picture" of empirical reality. Meaningful propositions must be constructed from "atomic propositions"—the simplest statements that represent atomic facts about the world. Because metaphysical, ethical, and religious claims cannot be constructed through logical operations on these atomic propositions, Wittgenstein concluded they are, strictly speaking, "senseless" or meaningless when expressed in ordinary language.321

However, Wittgenstein did not intend to dismiss these topics as entirely worthless. He proposed a distinction between what can be "said" and what can be "shown". While metaphysical truths cannot be stated coherently, he argued that the logical structure of language and the nature of reality can be "shown" through the act of attempting to express them. He famously compared his own work to a ladder that a reader must climb to "see the world rightly" before throwing it away, suggesting that while metaphysical statements fail to describe the world, they can illuminate truths that lie beyond the reach of scientific language.4132