Few poems set up a puzzle as quickly as "I think of a time when there was no time." The line contradicts itself on purpose. The speaker imagines a world before minutes, hours and calendars, and keeps asking whether people were happier there. The central idea is that time is something humans made, and that we may have paid for it with calm. But the poem never settles into simple nostalgia. By the end, the speaker isn't even sure the past they are longing for ever existed.
The poem is built around a refrain: "I think of a time when there was no time, / Long long ago. Were we happier then?" It returns three times, like a chorus that the speaker can't stop humming. Each return opens a new stretch of thought, so the poem circles its question rather than marching toward an answer. That suits the subject, since a poem about escaping the clock's forward push moves in loops instead of a straight line.
The first stretch shows how time is assembled. Three lines begin "Before we made," and each stacks a larger unit on the last: hours into days, days into months, months into years. The verb matters. Nobody says "Before time began." The speaker says *we made* it, as if the calendar were a piece of furniture we built and then had to live inside. Reading the lines is like climbing a ladder, which is the point, because the speaker wants us to feel how much has been piled up.
The second stretch swaps that ladder for a list of small pressures, each opening with "No." "No hustle and bustle" has a bouncy, rhyming jingle that mimics the rush it names. "No beating the clock" turns an everyday idiom into a little fight we never win. The most interesting image comes last: "No clocks to wind every night." It's a homely, physical chore, and it shows that the clock needs us as much as we need it. We keep the machine going, and it keeps us on schedule. The detail makes the speaker's tiredness feel real without a word of complaint.
Then the poem changes direction. In the final stretch, statements give way to questions: "Did trees really grow One hundred feet tall? / Did dragons breathe fire? / Did mankind live in caves? / Did God exist?" Look at what has been mixed together: giant trees, fantasy, early human history and belief in God, all treated as equally uncertain. The speaker's "really" admits that this lost world may be part legend. The capital "One" in "One hundred feet tall" is an odd, slightly uneven touch, as if the size is being exaggerated even as it is said. The short, blunt "Did God exist?" lands like a drop in the voice, and it is the biggest question the poem asks.
The ending also breaks the pattern. The refrain's first line is missing, and we get only "Were we happier then?" The question is left hanging with nothing to cushion it. There's a quiet irony here too. The speaker cannot describe a timeless world without time words: "long ago," "before," "then," "every night." Language itself runs on sequence, so even the dream of escape has to be told in time's vocabulary.
The form is plain. There is no end rhyme, and the lines are short, in simple, mostly one-syllable words. The beat is loose but lilting, close to a chant or a fairy-tale opening, and "Long long ago" does echo the storyteller's "once upon a time." That childlike simplicity helps the poem's big questions feel gentle rather than heavy.
The poem matters because it takes a worry almost everyone has, that life is too hurried, and sends it back through all of human history. It doesn't claim that the past was better. It asks, and the uncertainty is its honesty. A reader finishes the poem with the same question and, probably, a quick glance at the nearest clock.