Lime Tree Analysis

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Poetry, Perception, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Nature

This Lime-tree Bower my Prison belongs to the period in Coleridge’s life, in 1797, when the poet was living in close proximity to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, in Somerset, and arises from an occasion in June of that year when the Wordsworths and a visitor from London, Coleridge’s friend from his schooldays, Charles Lamb (a poet and essayist), left Coleridge, who had been disabled by ‘an accident’, in his ‘garden bower’, and went walking in the neighbouring countryside.

The poem’s title captures the mood of the opening lines (wherein it is repeated), and the impression that is conveyed is strong negative in ‘prison’. The oddity of the title – and, so, its arresting quality – is that a location as lovely as a ‘lime-tree bower’ should be prison-like. The Romantics usually celebrated the beautiful natural world, its plants and animals. However, the reason for this negative perception of the bower is immediately presented in the poem’s opening phrase, “well, they are gone,”

The speaker, although surrounded by beauty, is bereft of human companionship. Again, from the perspective of Romanticism, this is an ambiguous statement – for the Romantics enjoyed solitude, yet it was to be differentiated from loneliness. Coleridge’s isolation from his friends here is worsened by the fact that it is enforced by his inability to talk on this evening. This aggravation of his situation justifies its description in terms of imprisonment, “and here I must remain/ this lime-tree bower my prison! ” the use of the exclamation mark intensifies his passionate frustration.

The first verse paragraph is a lament for his dissociation from his friends, and the experiences in nature that they are enjoying on their walk. In the second verse sentence of this paragraph, Coleridge sounds a characteristic Romantic note in celebrating (even as he is lamenting his separation from it) the importance of youthful experience, of ‘beauties and feelings’, especially for the purpose of recollection in later years. The quote “I have lost/ beauties and feelings, such as would have been/ most sweet to me remembrance even when age/ had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness! emphasises this argument. We remember that Romanticism set high value on beauty and feeling, on youthful passion and on nostalgia and recollection. The extremity of Coleridge’s grief at his ‘imprisonment’ in the lime-tree bower is evident in his apprehension that these friends, walking away from him, might be lost to him forever. Rationally, this seems an overreaction, but such a powerful sense of the emotions, and their ability to govern our thoughts, is typically Romantic.

So, too, is the imaginative picture that Coleridge paints of his friends’ walk – both in the exercise of imagination which it embodies and the vivid and various description of natural phenomena that it includes: “they/ on springy heath, along the hill-top edge/ wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance/ to that still roaring dell, of which I told,” it is evident, by this stage in the poem, that Coleridge not only misses his companions, but regrets that he, too, is not wandering in gladness in the natural world.

We notice a contrast here between the domestic prettiness of a lime-tree bower and the grander, livelier environment of untamed nature. Coleridge repeats himself, with onomatopoeia, to emphasise this quality, beloved of Romantics: “the roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep/ and only speckled by the mid-day sun,” that the dell is “deep” and “only speckled” by sunlight (even a noon) indicates not only its darkness, but also its mystery and, to an extent, its thrilling danger.

This is a very different location from a lime-tree bower. The vitality of nature is captured in the use of verbs in the following lines: “where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock/ flings arching like a bridge,” even leaves that do not appear to move, nonetheless ‘tremble’. ‘Fann’d by the water-fall! ’ Nature is alive in all its aspects: assertively, in the case of the ash’s trunk; delicately, in the case of the trembling of its ‘poor yellow leaves’.

Although absent from his friends, Coleridge is present with them – through imagination – and addresses them directly, in a forceful imperative, to regard another feature of nature’s splendour: “behold the dark green file of long lank weeds/ that all at once (a most fantastic sight)/ still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge/ of the blue clay-stone,” the alliteration on “I” adds to the visual sense of length and languor, the onomatopoeia of ‘drip’ and ‘dripping’ gives an aural dimension to the description, and the monosyllabic rhythm of ‘nod and drip’ conveys the sense of that regular motion in the ordered disorder of bountiful nature.

We can see that is poem is enacting the recovery of Coleridge’s spirits, from dejection to exultation, as he joins his friends imaginatively, metaphysically. In the second verse paragraph, they have emerged from the darkness and dankness of the dell to a hilltop with an inspiring view of the sky (‘the wide, wide heaven’) and all the countryside down to the ocean: “the many-steepled tract magnificent/ of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea…” that the sky is referred to as ‘heaven’ and the church steeples are noted, adds a religious dimension to this celebration of friendship and nature.

With a painter’s eye, Coleridge depicts a ship on that sea, in an exquisite miniature: “with some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up/ the slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles/ of purple shadow! ” only that ‘perhaps’ reminds us that Coleridge is only imagining the scene, not witnessing it, so vivid is the portrayal. The gladness that the poet attributes to the wanderers – and the repeated concept of wandering, incidentally, is noteworthy (suggesting a meditative progress, appropriate to an almost spiritual appreciation of nature) – is focused on Charles Lamb, the city-dweller.

The Romantic contrast between the urban and rural environments is strikingly before us here: “thou hast pined/ an hunger’d after nature, many a year/ in the great city pent, winning thy way/ with sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain/ and strange calamity,” As Coleridge is temporarily imprisoned in his lime-tree bower, so Charles is seen – but for ‘many a year’, not just ‘a few hours’ – as a prisoner of London. The poet is ecstatic at the thought of the blessings of nature upon his gentle-hearted friend who is so inappropriately bound to the city with its ‘evil and pain/ and strange calamity’.

Again, a religious theme is being advanced here. Innately, Charles is gentle of heart and patient of soul – spiritual qualities – but these profound aspects of his being are inhibited by London. Once in nature, however, his true self will be able to emerge in communion with the divine: So my friend/ stuck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood/ silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing around/ on the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem/ less gross than bodily; and of such hues/ as veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes/ spirits perceive his presence,” God is to be found in the natural world, and His worship undertaken there in oy and ecstasy. The Romantic doctrine of Pantheism is implicitly present here; the sense of God’s presence in nature. The complete transformation of Coleridge’s mood is accomplished in the final verse paragraph. The originally detested lime-tree bower is now affectionately evoked in the diminutive, “in this bower/ this little lime-tree bower,” and he notes that he has marked ‘much that has sooth’d me’ in it. The bower, too, has its beauties, revealed especially as night is coming on, and the bat replaces the swallow and bee (these three creatures are aurally present, in the poetry, in onomatopoeia).

Coleridge’s thesis is three-fold: first, that there is much to be gained from meditation in isolation (as the negativity of loneliness modulates to the positive qualities of solitude) and the exercise of the imagination (as, here, in his journeying with the absent wanderers and his empathy, in particular, with Charles Lamb). Secondly, his ‘imprisonment’ has revealed the unity and harmony of the spirit of nature, as evident in the lime-tree bower, a ‘plot so narrow’, as in any ‘waste to vacant’.

The bower is as effective in keeping ‘the heart/ awake to love and beauty’ as any of the scenes the wanderers have enjoyed: this very poem proves that. Thirdly, Coleridge argues, philosophically, that the prevention of our participation in happiness sharpens our sense of its sublimity: “and sometimes/ ‘tis well to be bereft of promis’d good/ that we may left the soul, and contemplate/ with lively joy the joys we cannot share” In agreeable contrast with these general musings, the poem closes in specific focus, again, in Charles Lamb.

Coleridge loves to imagine his friend’s perception – akin to his own – of the mightiness, profundity and particularly of creation, here memorably depicted in the sight of a tiny bird crossing the night sky: “when the last rook/ beats its straight path along the dusky air/ homewards, I blest it! Deeming its black wing/ (now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)/had cross’d the mighty Orb’s dilated glory/ while thou stood’st gazing,”

That the rook’s path is straight shows the divine design of nature. That the world has been vested in glory and that Charles stands gazing similarly convey the poet’s idea of the spiritual implications of these sights. Even the unprepossessing aspects of nature, like a bird ‘creeking o’er thy head’, are part of that divine design and harmony, for “no sound is dissonant which tells of life”.

Like many Romantic poems, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison is as striking for its celebration of the poet’s powers of perception as of the subjects perceived. We have a keener sense of the beauty of nature after reading it, but we also have an appreciation of the poet’s unique genius for seeing the ordinary extraordinarily and ‘the real’ mystically.