This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

Stretching across nearly all realms of Romanticism is the idea that individual freedom animates the imagination. I find that Samuel Taylor Coleridge explicitly expresses this query of thought in his poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” In addition to Coleridge, many other members of the Romantic movement also engaged in imagination-centered writing. Conversely, the Enlightenment movement opposed encouraging individuals to utilize their imagination. Instead, the Enlightenment valued scientific conclusions brought about using rational and empirical thinking, and therefore, Romanticism challenged the preexisting Enlightenment beliefs in England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Romantic authors’ tendency to use emotionally charged
However, around line 7, the speaker’s tone changes as he begins to use increasingly vivid words to describe what he imagines his friends witnessing on their walk, and in line 8, the word “perchance” signals that the speaker’s imagination is now at work. Along with the more descriptive use of imagery beginning in line 10, Coleridge uses other literary devices to show a change in the speaker’s mind frame. The speaker recalls an ash tree located near the waterfall and likens the tree’s bowed trunk to a bridge in line 13. Additionally, the movement of the ash tree’s “few poor yellow leaves” trembling from the force of the waterfall and the soaking wet “dark green file of long lank weeds” swaying underneath the waterfall’s edge reflect the movement and development in the speaker’s tone (14, 17). By comparing the ash tree’s arching shape to a bridge and conveying movement in the waterfall’s surroundings, Coleridge shows that the speaker is experiencing a movement in his mind, and he is crossing over a bridge of his own from a place of sullen thoughts to a new world only his imagination can