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.