FOOTNOTES:
[419:2] First published in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, in the preliminary matter, p. v: included in 1828, 1829, and 1834. In the 'Preface' to Sibylline Leaves, p. iii, an apology is offered for its insertion on the plea that it was a 'school boy poem' added 'at the request of the friends of my youth'. 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.' In a Notebook of (?) 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 former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but only to have moved. There, there it was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. 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. This I feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in despondent, objectless manhood—time objective and subjective.' Anima Poetae, 1895, pp. 241-2.
AN INVOCATION[420:1]
From remorse
[Act iii, Scene i. ll. 69-82.]
Hear, sweet Spirit, hear the spell,
Lest a blacker charm compel!
So shall the midnight breezes swell
With thy deep long-lingering knell.
And at evening evermore, [5]
In a chapel on the shore,
Shall the chaunter, sad and saintly,
Yellow tapers burning faintly,
Doleful masses chaunt for thee,
Miserere Domine! [10]
Hush! the cadence dies away
On the quiet moonlight sea:
The boatmen rest their oars and say,
Miserere Domine!
1812.