“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.