“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Summary

• Well, my friends are gone, and I must stay here; this shady arbor is my jail! I've missed out on beautiful sights and profound feelings that would have stayed with me forever, comforting me even when I'm a blind old man. Meanwhile, my friends—whom I might never see ever again—wander happily across the firm, bouncy turf of the fields or the crest of the hills. Perhaps they make their way down to the little valley where the waterfall roars, the one I told them about—that valley, thickly forested, narrow, deep, and only dotted here and there with the light of the noon sun. There, the ash tree flings itself from rock to rock, bending itself like a bridge—the bare, wet ash that never gets any sun, whose handful of yellow leaves never quiver in the wind, though they quiver in the breeze that comes off the waterfall. There, my friends see the ranks of long, limp, dark green weeds, which, all at the same time (an astonishing thing to see!) sway and drip together beneath the dripping edge of the bluish stone they hang from.

  Now my friends emerge from the valley into a wide-open hillside under the sky, and again see the grand, church-tower-dotted sweep of hills, fields, meadows, and the ocean—which perhaps has some lovely boat out sailing on it, whose sails add a flash of brightness to the little stretch of calm blue water between two islands of dark purple cloud-shadow. Yes! My friends amble on together, all happy—but I think you must be the happiest among them, my kindhearted Charles. For you've been starved for Nature for years now, trapped in London, finding your way (with a sad but persistent soul) through all sorts of terrible misfortunes. Oh, sink slowly behind the hills to the west, great Sun! Glow in the low, angled rays of sunset light, you purple flowers of the heather! Catch fire with even richer color, you clouds! Come alive in the yellow light, you far-off woods! And burn bright, you blue Ocean! Then my friend may stand there in intense joy, as I have in the past—silent and dizzy—yes, looking intently at the broad landscape, looking until the whole world looks almost ethereal, hardly physical at all—until the world looks dressed in the colors of God's garments when he shows himself to mortal spirits.

  My heart fills with sudden joy, and I'm as happy as if I were there myself. And it's not as if, while I've been sitting in this little lime arbor, I haven't seen many things that have made me feel better. I saw pale leaves translucent in the bright sunlight, and delighted in the sight of a bright leaf catching the shadow of the leaves and stems above it so that it was freckled with light and shade. And that walnut tree was rich with deep color, and the old ivy seemed to glow as it grew over the elm trees at the front of the house—and now the ivy's dark form makes the trees' branches glow pale in the last of the twilight. And while the bat swoops past in silence, and not a single swallow chirps, a lone bumblebee still sings in the bean flowers! From now on, I'll not forget that nature never abandons those who are wise and pure. There's no stretch of ground so small (if only Nature is there), no wasteland so barren, that it can't touch all the senses and keep the heart alert to Love and Beauty! And from time to time it's not a bad thing to miss out on something you were looking forward to: disappointment helps to raise the soul to higher thoughts, giving us the chance to empathize with other people's joys even if we can't share them. My dear, kindhearted Charles! When the last of the rooks flew straight through the darkening air on its way home, I blessed it, deciding that its black wing (now just a tiny speck, now vanishing in the last of the sunlight) must have crossed the great Sun's swelling sunset light while you stood there watching—or, when everything had fallen quiet, perhaps the rook flew calling over your head, and charmed you, my dear Charles, to whom no sound is unharmonious if it speaks of Life.

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Themes

• 

  The Creative and Connective Power of the Imagination

  When an injured foot means he can’t join his visiting friends for a hike in the Quantocks (a beautiful region of the southwestern English countryside), this poem’s speaker—Coleridge himself—feels pretty put out. All he can do is sit in his own garden, trapped in a “lime-tree bower” (a sheltered sitting-place under lime trees) that feels like a “prison.” From here, however, he can imagine what his friends are doing—and that makes all the difference. The imagination, in this poem, has the power to conjure and to connect: picturing the hike vividly, Coleridge can both feel as if he’s there and take part in his friends’ pleasure.

  Sulking under the lime trees, Coleridge at first feels dreadfully cut off from his friends and their fun. He’s so bereft that he even melodramatically declares he “never more may meet [his friends] again.” This may have been the last chance he’ll ever have in his whole life to go on this walk with these people. And he’s missing it!

  This gloomy thought leads him to picture what his friends must be doing and seeing right now—and bit by bit, his imagining changes his feelings. Tracing his friends’ imagined progress along a well-known path, he sees in his mind’s eye the “roaring dell” where a waterfall cascades; the pale ash tree that trembles in the breeze from the falling water; the waterweed dripping under the rocks. As he conjures up the whole scene for himself and the reader alike, his imagination allows him to feel as if he’s really there. In a sense, he’s re-creating the landscape in his own mind.

  More than that, these imaginings allow him to take part in his friends’ pleasure. In particular, he puts himself in the shoes of his friend Charles Lamb, a Londoner who has terribly missed the beauty of nature. Coleridge’s imagination here bridges not just the physical but the metaphorical space between himself and his buddy, allowing him to be with Charles in a way perhaps even more profound than if he’d been on the walk, feeling his feelings and seeing through his eyes. Imagination offers empathy as well as freedom.

  Through deeply imagining both the walk and Charles’s experience of the walk, Coleridge finds, to his surprise, that he feels “as glad / As I myself were there!” His imagination has made the walk real to him, leaving him changed.

  The poem itself becomes not only a record of this imagining but a demonstration of the imagination’s power. By capturing and conveying Coleridge’s experience, the poem makes the reader a player in the day, imaginatively present with Coleridge and Lamb at the same time, seeing what they see and sharing in their happiness. In its very form, the poem demonstrates that the creative imagination has the power to transcend space and time.

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• 

  The Wisdom, Beauty, and Divinity of Nature

  Stuck in his garden with an injured foot and missing out on a hike, this poem’s speaker (Coleridge himself) reflects on all the natural beauties his friends must be experiencing right now—and then on the beauties that surround him even here in his own backyard. Even in the form of a single tree or a little patch of grass, Nature keeps the “heart / Awake to love and beauty,” offering wisdom and solace to those willing to open their minds to it.

  Coleridge is very familiar with the walk his friends have taken—in fact, he recommended the route—so he can picture just what they’re seeing as they go, from a sheltered waterfall to a bright seacoast. Though he mourns missing the chance to see these things himself, he’s pleased at the thought that his “gentle-hearted Charles” (Charles Lamb, Coleridge’s good friend and a fellow writer) is getting the chance to soak up the local beauties. He knows that Lamb, who’s usually “in the great city pent” (that is, penned up in London), has “hunger’d after Nature,” desperate for a breath of fresh air.

  Such a hunger, in Coleridge’s view, isn’t just a hunger for beauty. Nature, as he’s sure Charles is understanding even now, is also restorative, wise, and even holy, a transparent “veil” for the “Almighty Spirit.” To spend time in nature, Coleridge suggests, is to be near God, consoled by the presence of something infinitely good.

  In fact, Coleridge realizes, he’s felt the same touch of the divine even in the little bit of nature around him at home in the “lime-tree bower” (that is, a sheltered sitting-place under the lime trees). Until now, he’s rather sulkily seen the bower as his “prison.” But finding himself filled with sympathetic joy at the thought of what Lamb must be getting from his hike, he all at once sees that he’s partaking of that joy, too: all along, he’s been enjoying the “shadow of the leaf and stem above,” the “deep radiance” of the ivy, and the sound of the bee as it “sings in the bean-flower.”

  Even in the bleakest “waste” or the narrowest strip of grass, Coleridge realizes, the slightest touch of nature can “employ / Each faculty of sense” (that is, awake every one of the senses) and “keep the Heart / awake to Love and Beauty.” The natural world, to him, is the work and the garment of God, an awe-inspiring and consoling reminder of goodness itself.

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• 

  The Unexpected Value of Disappointment

  In its first lines, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” sounds as if it’s going to be a poem all about the pain and anxiety of disappointment. The speaker (Coleridge himself) is deeply upset that, due to an injured foot, he can’t join his visiting friends on a hike. He fears that he might be missing out on “beauties and feelings” that would have become “sweet to [his] remembrance” for the rest of his life, perhaps even memories he’d return to for comfort in his old age. In short, he's sure that fate has robbed him of something profoundly important.

  As he sits and imagines what his friends might be up to out there, however, the power of his imagination and his empathy for his buddy Charles (who’s been having a miserable time in London and desperately needed a countryside holiday) build and burgeon until he feels an unexpected “delight” springing up “sudden in [his] heart.”

  This moment of delight isn’t the only unexpected pleasure he gains from his thwarted walk. Being forced to sit still in his garden, he says, has reminded him that “sometimes / ‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good” (that is, it’s sometimes a good thing to be disappointed in a hope or a plan). That’s because accepting a disappointment allows us to “lift the soul, and contemplate / With lively joy the joys we cannot share.” Not getting what we want, in other words, might offer us an opportunity to feel unselfish pleasure in other people’s pleasure, stretching our imaginations to share in their experiences and their happiness.

  Coleridge’s long afternoon sitting at hope thus offers him not only the joy of unselfish empathy, but enduring wisdom about such empathy. For that matter, he gains this poem, a lasting, moving record of his happiness and his insight. Not getting precisely what we wanted, this poem’s very existence suggests, can sometimes mean receiving gifts we couldn’t have anticipated.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

• Lines 1-5

  Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
  This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
  Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
  Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
  Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness!

  “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” begins on a note of dismay. “Well,” the speaker declares, “they are gone, and here must I remain.” His friends, readers gather, have gone for a walk, while he’s been left to sit in the garden all by his lonesome. The pleasant, shady “lime-tree bower” (or arbor of lime trees) under whose leaves he rests, he says, is nothing more than a “prison”—a moment of hyperbole that rings with both rueful humor and sincere unhappiness. In these first lines, this poem sets itself up as a tale of severe English Romantic FOMO.

  It's not just the walk itself he’s missing, the speaker goes on, but the lasting treasures he might have stored up on such a walk:

  [...] I have lost
  Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
  Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
  Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! [...]

  In other words, the pleasure of going for a walk with friends isn’t just about the walk itself. It’s about the memories of the walk, lasting impressions that the speaker imagines might have stayed with him all his life. Even after his physical eyes have “dimm’d to blindness,” he says, his mind’s eye might still have relished the “beauties” he would have seen today, and he might have felt the day’s “feelings” all over again.

  On the one hand, these lines might just sound like more hyperbole, and rather self-pitying hyperbole at that: I’m missing out on making lifelong memories right now! But, quietly, they invite readers to reflect on an idea that will become central to this poem’s philosophy: the relationship between what the eye sees and what the mind sees. Here at the outset, the memory of the walk seems like what the speaker wants as much as the walk itself.

  This is a true story:

  • On the day Coleridge drafted this poem in 1797, he was indeed sitting in a garden, missing out on a walk because, in a badly-timed kitchen mishap, his wife Sara had spilled boiling milk on his foot.
  • Worse, he was meant to have been walking with close friends who’d come out to visit him at his home in Somerset (a beautiful region of southwest England). Those friends were a pretty illustrious crew. Among them were Coleridge’s great collaborator William Wordsworth; Wordsworth’s sister, the brilliant diarist Dorothy; and the essayist Charles Lamb, to whom this poem is dedicated.
  • For this group, walking wasn’t just about passing a pleasant afternoon, but about communing with the natural world, drawing inspiration and joy from a landscape that they saw as inherently divine. Exploring nature and writing poetry went hand in hand for Wordsworth and Coleridge, who often composed while walking—Wordsworth pacing up and down on level ground, Coleridge scrambling over rocks and roots.

  Spare a little sympathy for Coleridge, then: the “beauties and feelings” he’s lost aren’t trivial. But over the course of this poem, he’ll find his way toward other beauties and feelings, ones he needn’t leave his lime-tree prison to discover.

  He’ll do so in 78 lines of blank verse—that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter, a form with a grand pedigree. These flowing lines of five iambs apiece (that is, five da-DUMs in a row, as in “Well, they | are gone, | and here | must I | remain”) might be most familiar to readers from the work of Shakespeare and Milton: this is the rhythm in which Hamlet contemplates death and in which Satan rallies rebel angels. Coleridge, innovatively, uses the form to track the quiet progression of his own thoughts. This is one of what later critics dubbed Coleridge’s “conversation poems”—poems in which Coleridge finds his way through the ordinary world into grand metaphysical visions.

• Lines 5-9

  They, meanwhile,
  Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
  On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
  Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
  To that still roaring dell, of which I told;

  

  

  

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• Lines 10-16

  The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
  And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
  Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
  Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,
  Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
  Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
  Fann'd by the water-fall!

  

  

  

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• Lines 16-20

  and there my friends
  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.

  

  

  

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• Lines 21-27

  Now, my friends emerge
  Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
  The many-steepled tract magnificent
  Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
  With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
  The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
  Of purple shadow!

  

  

  

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• Lines 27-33

  Yes! they wander on
  In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
  My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
  And 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!

  

  

  

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• Lines 33-38

  Ah! slowly sink
  Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
  Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
  Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
  Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
  And kindle, thou blue Ocean!

  

  

  

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• Lines 38-47

  So my friend
  Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
  Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
  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.
                                                          A delight
  Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
  As I myself were there!

  

  

  

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• Lines 47-53

  Nor in this bower,
  This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
  Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
  Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
  Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
  The shadow of the leaf and stem above
  Dappling its sunshine!

  

  

  

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• Lines 53-58

  And that walnut-tree
  Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
  Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
  Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
  Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
  Through the late twilight:

  

  

  

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• Lines 58-61

  and though now the bat
  Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
  Yet still the solitary humble-bee
  Sings in the bean-flower!

  

  

  

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• Lines 61-69

  Henceforth I shall know
  That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
  No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
  No waste so vacant, but may well employ
  Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
  Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
  'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
  That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
  With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

  

  

  

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• Lines 70-78

  My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
  Beat 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; or, when all was still,
  Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
  For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
  No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

  

  

  

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“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Symbols

• 

  The Ash Tree

  The frail, yellow-leaved ash tree in the dell becomes a symbol of Coleridge's own imaginative effort. This little tree is physically limited: it grows in a valley so deeply shadowed that it never sees much sun, and its few leaves are a wan yellow. But it still "flings" itself across the waterfall, "arching like a bridge," growing in spite of its limits. In the moment Coleridge pictures that arching ash tree, he's also building a metaphorical bridge between where he sits in the lime-tree bower (like the ash, he's stuck in one shady spot) and where his friends wander. The ash tree in his imagination becomes a symbol of his imagination, putting all its energy into a creative leap.

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“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Apostrophe

  Much of this poem is framed as an apostrophe to Charles Lamb, Coleridge’s long-time friend. One of the greatest essayists in English, Charles was also a notably kindhearted, patient, and self-effacing guy. His many affectionate literary buddies often punned on his surname, calling him “Lamb, the frolic and the gentle” and similar (to his mild, good-natured annoyance).

  Charles was a lifelong and loyal Londoner, and though he probably didn’t feel quite as “pent” in the “great city” as Coleridge imagines—Coleridge himself was the one who felt fidgety in London—he might still have needed a holiday pretty badly:

  • In 1796, the year before Coleridge wrote this poem, the Lamb family suffered a great tragedy. Charles's beloved sister Mary experienced what we might now diagnose as a psychotic break and stabbed their mother to death.
  • The family managed to keep Mary out of prison. But for the rest of his life, Charles would be Mary's caretaker. When she was well, the two of them would collaborate on writing projects (like their famous Tales From Shakespeare, retellings of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at children). When she felt a bad spell coming on, Charles would walk her to a mental hospital. One anecdote records both of them weeping as they made this bleak journey.

  Coleridge wrote this poem not so very long after “strange calamity” struck the Lambs, and his apostrophes to his “gentle-hearted Charles” overflow with tenderness. Addressing his friend from a distance, Coleridge suggests that the spiritual distance between the pair is small indeed. Coleridge’s imaginative empathy with Charles and his affectionate understanding of Charles’s sensitivity make it feel as if he’s right there with his friend.

  Coleridge also apostrophizes the world around Charles, egging it on: he tells the flowers to glow purple in the beams of the setting sun, the clouds to glow even “richlier,” and the woods to “live” in the light—to spring to a delighted consciousness, as awake to their own beauty as the people who look at them. These apostrophes see Coleridge not just rejoicing in imagined beauty, but creating it, conducting a symphony of sunset colors in his own mind. The imagined view he conjures for Charles is an ideal one—the most intense version of an already intensely beautiful sight.

  This direct communication with the landscape reflects Coleridge’s spiritual worldview, too. As he records in this poem, he sees nature and humanity as all wrapped up together, part of a unified soul that is also encompassed by God. As his spirit and Charles’s communicate with each other, so his spirit and the landscape interpenetrate.

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• Imagery

  

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

  

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• Hyperbole

  

  

  

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“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Bower
• Perchance
• Dell
• O'erwooded
• Fantastic
• Many-steepled
• Bark
• Methinks
• Pined
• Calamity
• Richlier burn
• Kindle
• Gross
• Hues
• Ting'd
• Usurps
• Plot
• Faculty of sense
• 'Tis well
• Bereft
• Blest
• Deeming
• The mighty Orb's dilated glory
• Creeking
• Dissonant

• A sheltered place overhung with plants, usually containing a bench or sitting place.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

• Form

  “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is part of a series that critics have dubbed Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” While Coleridge didn’t formally group these eight poems himself, later readers see them as related by both the philosophy Coleridge explores in them—the idea of the world as a manifestation of a unifying, loving God—and by their voice. Coleridge always speaks as himself in these poems, and he often addresses a loved one, from his little son Hartley to his unrequited beloved Sara Hutchison to his friend and collaborator William Wordsworth. But the poems are also conversations with himself, and they're full of his fervent personality. A dazzling talker and a brilliant thinker, Coleridge used these verses to both explore and declare his beliefs.

  This meditative poem, like a number of the conversation poems, is written in blank verse—that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. Over the course of the poem’s 78 lines, Coleridge makes this august old form his own: the poem sounds, well, conversational, full of musing repetitions and joyous outbursts.

  This form also elegantly tracks a developing line of thought. When Coleridge breaks a line in the middle to mark a new phase in the poem (breaks that divide the poem roughly into three stanzas), readers can see how his mind, like the bridging ash tree, has flung itself between one place and another, letting him cross to somewhere new.

• Meter

  “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is written in blank verse—lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. That means that each line uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 9 for example:

  To that | still roar- | ing dell | to which | I told;

  This is a familiar meter in English-language poetry, and its steady flow almost fades into the background, like the constant roar of the waterfall in the poem's dell. Presented in this hypnotic rhythm, Coleridge’s thoughts feel conversational and spontaneous.

  Iambic pentameter’s flexibility helps create that effect, too. There’s room for variation in this meter, and Coleridge doesn’t have to stick rigidly to iambs all the way through. Listen to the very first line, for instance:

  Friends, whom | I nev- | er more | may meet | again,

  The trochee that begins the line (the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm) adds some extra sulky force to the lines in which Coleridge laments all he's missing: Old Sam will just have to sit here all alone rather than making lifelong memories with his friends whom he may never see again, I guess!

• Rhyme Scheme

  Written in blank verse, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. That’s part of what gives this “conversation poem” its conversational tone. Coleridge’s voice here is certainly musical, but more subtly so than it would have been in a rhyming poem. Readers seem to be getting a glimpse at Coleridge's thoughts as they unfurl organically as leaves.

  Of course, that's all part of Coleridge's purpose, a careful and crafty choice. This poem is meant to feel immediate, as if it were a moment-by-moment record of Coleridge's experience, and the lack of rhyme helps to create that impression.

  Blank verse has its own grandeur too, though. Coleridge may have been thinking of no less majestic predecessor than John Milton when he turned to the form. Milton used blank verse in his epic Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to man"—a daring and ambitious project, to put it mildly. Coleridge, innovatively, uses this august form to trace the movements of one man's mind as it moves through the everyday world, tiptoeing toward the sublime by way of the ordinary.

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Speaker

• "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" records a real incident in the poet's life, and the speaker is Coleridge himself. While Coleridge’s friends Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth were visiting him in Devon, an unfortunate kitchen mishap (Coleridge’s wife Sara spilled a pan of boiling milk on his foot) meant that Coleridge couldn’t join the group for their favorite activity: a long stride through the countryside. Left sulking under a lime tree in his friend Thomas Poole’s back garden, Coleridge passed the time by writing the first draft of this poem.

  Coleridge’s distinctive voice, irrepressible personality, and philosophy are all on display here. He has his moments of emotional hyperbole and self-pity; his fascinated, precise, almost hypnotic attention to the natural world; his big-hearted sympathy and enthusiasm; and, last but far from least, his fervent belief in the unity of all life.

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Setting

• There’s a clear and specific setting in this poem: Somerset, the region of southwestern England where Coleridge and his family lived in the early years of his marriage. More specifically than that, it’s set near the Quantocks, a beautiful, hilly part of the countryside. More specifically than that, it’s set in a garden; more specifically than that, it’s set under the lime trees that grow in that garden. (Though Coleridge doesn’t mention it in the poem proper, scholars even know which garden this was: it belonged to Coleridge’s friend Thomas Poole, who often invited Coleridge over to have a sit and a scribble.) The setting here isn’t just precise, but personal, laden with memory and feeling.

  While Coleridge’s body never leaves his spot under the lime trees, his mind goes out rambling with his friends. Borne along on Coleridge’s imagination, readers take in not just the gentle beauty of the garden where he sits, but a wide view of sea, hill, and wood—the view he knows his friends must be delighting in even now. Envisioning these sights, to Coleridge, becomes as joyous an experience as seeing them: he finds himself taking part in nature’s beauty and his friends’ pleasure from afar, spiritually present if physically remote.

Literary and Historical Context of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

Literary Context

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the most brilliant, inspired, and troubled of the English Romantic poets. A big personality and bigger talker, Coleridge privately suffered from self-doubt, bone-deep loneliness, and (eventually) opium addiction. For a time, he found balance and friendship with the more grounded and temperate William Wordsworth; the inspired collaboration between these two poets would produce Lyrical Ballads (1798), a book often credited as the founding text of English Romanticism.

In Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge and Wordsworth took on two sides of the Romantic coin. Wordsworth's poetry focused on everyday country life and the wisdom of the natural world; Coleridge's work was wild and magical, populated by strange spirits. Both of these attitudes were deeply Romantic in their way: the Romantic poets believed both that poetry should be plainspoken and down-to-earth, and that it should also explore the outer reaches of the imagination.

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" similarly unites a humble, familiar setting with lofty metaphysics. Critics group this poem with eight others Coleridge wrote between 1795 and 1807, calling them the "conversation poems." Though Coleridge didn't formally link these poems himself, they share meaningful similarities: all are narrated by Coleridge, all address an important player or symbol in Coleridge's life (like his unrequited love Sara Hutchison and his baby son Hartley), all combine close attention to everyday life with philosophical grandeur—and all are, in a sense, Coleridge’s conversations with himself, explorations of his own consciousness. Coleridge first drafted "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" in 1797, enclosing it in a letter to his buddy Robert Southey; this, the best-known and final version, was published in Coleridge's 1834 collection Poetical Works.

Historical Context

This poem records a moment in a real-life friendship: the warm lifelong connection between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. The two met as undergraduates, and both became notable writers. Both, too, endured some serious troubles.

Some of Coleridge’s struggles were (arguably) his own fault. Seized by enthusiasm for a utopian community he planned to found with his friend Robert Southey, he married Sara Fricker, a lady he didn’t especially love, because Southey was marrying her sister and it seemed convenient. Neither the Coleridge marriage nor the utopian community panned out. Coleridge and Fricker fought almost from the start, and would eventually separate—a scandalous choice in early 19th-century England.

At the time this poem was written, the couple were still not-very-happily living together near the Quantocks (a lovely range of hills in southwestern England). The injury that kept Coleridge at home on the day he wrote this poem was due to a domestic accident: Sara spilled a pot of boiling milk on his foot.

Charles Lamb’s troubles, meanwhile, were just plain cruel misfortune. Both Charles and his beloved sister Mary, with whom he lived and collaborated on writing projects, endured serious bouts of mental illness. Mary’s were considerably more severe, however, and out of them grew a family tragedy. In 1796, the year before this poem was written, she had what modern medicine might call a psychotic break and fatally stabbed her mother. Mary would spend the rest of her life in and out of mental institutions; when she felt a bad spell coming on, Charles would walk her to a hospital, brother and sister both in tears.

When Coleridge speaks of the “evil and pain / And strange calamity” that Charles has suffered of late, then, he’s really not kidding: the man very much needed a break from London and the dreadful things he and his loved ones had endured there. Coleridge was only one of the Lambs’ many friends to remark on Charles’s dauntlessly kind and gentle spirit in the face of terrible tragedy.

More “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem in Manuscript — See some early versions of the poem in Coleridge's own hand.

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to Ian McKellen performing the poem.

  • A Brief Biography — Learn more about Coleridge's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.

  • Portraits of Coleridge — Admire some portraits of Coleridge, both as a passionate young man and an older, sadder, wiser one.

  • Coleridge and Lamb — Learn about the long friendship between Coleridge and his "gentle-hearted Charles."

  • Coleridge's Legacy — Read a short appreciation of Coleridge's conversation poems that discusses their lasting effect on poetry.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Samuel Coleridge

  • Constancy to an Ideal Object

  • Dejection: An Ode

  • Frost at Midnight

  • Kubla Khan

  • The Eolian Harp

  • The Pains of Sleep