This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge during 1797. The poem discusses a time in which Coleridge was forced to stay beneath a lime tree while his friends were able to enjoy the countryside. Within the poem, Coleridge is able to connect to his friend's experience and enjoy nature through him, which keeps the lime tree from being a mental prison in addition to a physical one.

During summer 1797, Coleridge was surrounded by many friends, including John Thelwall, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Thomas Poole, and his wife Sara Fricker. During this time, he would relax, enjoy the surroundings, and work on poetry. However, there were problems between him and his wife, and she suffered from a miscarriage at the end of July. It was within this setting that Coleridge composed a poem while left alone at Poole's property underneath a lime tree while Lamb, the Wordsworths, and his wife went on a journey across the Quantocks. The poem was dedicated to Lamb, Fricker, and the generic friends, but Fricker's name was left out of the published edition. Coleridge later explained to Robert Southey that he stayed behind because his wife "accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb's stay."

The location of Poole's home was Nether Stowey, which contained a garden, an arbour, and a tannery, and a little cottage that Coleridge stayed in while working on poetry. The arbour, containing the lime tree, was a place that Coleridge favored in a note to Poole's edition of Coleridge's poems: "I love to shut my eyes, and bring before my imaginations that Arbour, in which I have repeated so many of these compositions to you. Dear Arbour! An Elysium to which I have often passed by your Cerberus, and Tartarean tan-pits!". The first version of the poem was sent in a letter to Southey and was only 56 lines. The 1800 edition, the first published edition, was 76 lines long. The poem was also revised and published under another name in Southey's Annual Anthology. A later revised edition was included in Sibylline Leaves, Coleridge's 1817 collection of poems.

The poem begins by explaining how the narrator was separated from his friends:

The poem then describes the journey in the Quantocks from Lamb's point of view, and then goes on to describe Lamb:

Twilight is described as calming and the poem continues with night's fall:

The use of blank verse is to emphasize the conversational elements of the poem in a similar manner to William Cowper's The Task. Like Cowper's, Coleridge's verse allows for alternations of tone and emphasizes both country and urban environments. However, Coleridge is more concrete than Cowper in the sense that the ego stands in the foreground - in The Task the I, though dominant, purports to follow its subject matter. In "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" Coleridge attempts to discover the environment that his friends explore because he is unable to join them. This was accomplished in the original version by first describing how his friends came to be walking and then discussing Lamb's experience on the walk. The work introduces religious imagery but in a toned down form out of deference to Lamb's Unitarianism and perhaps partly out of Coleridge's own pantheistic feelings.

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