I don't know... when I was a little kid this song used to break 'my' heart into a million peices. I'm a jolly grown up 46 years of age now and I hadn't heard this song in maybe a couple of decades until it came up in... wait for it... a dream I had last night. Puff was there and he was 'my' best friend and we were joyful in a world without pressure, taxes, work and mortgage payments.

I woke up this morning and I was all over the place... there was a sad ending my dream hadn't taken into account. Poor Puff! And I found myself missing him! I can attest to the fact that my imagination, although frequently stifled by the pressures of modern living, is as vivid, powerful and fantastic as it was when I used to sing of frolicking in the Autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

The saddest thing for Puff is of course that his immortality prevented him from maturing alongside his best friend and also that the separation appears to have been instantaneous and without warning. What a shock for a magic dragon that must have been. The truth is that we all end up putting away childish things and forgetting (for the most part) our innocence. It's one of the many terrible features of mortality.

As with any work of literature, we will analyse and discover countless hidden meanings the original author hadn't intended at the time of writing. Who could have ever imagined how much life those few lines would have breathed into this figment of a youthful imagination.

And on the subject of imagination, we should remember that Puff was not a real dragon in the poem. There is a line which reads:

Painted wings and giant strings make way for other toys

So Puff was a toy in the poem, some kind of marionette by the sounds of it.
The cave he sadly slipped into was doubtless a toy box.
The only place he was real was in our hearts, and according to the dream I had last night, he lives on in happiness.