Lime Tree Analysis

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