Time, Real and Imaginary
An Allegory" is a short poem of 11 lines written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at an uncertain date, and first published in 1817.[1] On the wide level of a mountain's head,(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread,Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother!The title is explained as follows:—'By imaginary Time, I meant the state of a school boy's mind when on his return to school he projects his being in his day dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence; and this I contrasted with real Time.'[1] In a Notebook of c. 1811 there is an attempt to analyse and illustrate the 'sense of Time', which appears to have been written before the lines as published in Sibylline Leaves took shape: How marked the contrast between troubled manhood and joyously-active youth in the sense of time!To the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all.