Samuel Taylor Coleridge- This lime tree bower my prison. How does it represent

Question:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge- This lime tree bower my prison. How does it represent journeys?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: This extract is from ``Coleridge's Conversation Poems'', by George McLean Harper and should answer your question.

"On July 2, 1797, Coleridge, with Dorothy Wordsworth sitting beside him, drove from Racedown in Dorset to Nether Stowey in Somerset, and for about two weeks the small cottage behind Tom Poole's hospitable mansion sheltered William and Dorothy and perhaps Basil Montague's little boy, whom they were educating, besides Coleridge and Mrs. Coleridge and Hartley the baby and Nanny their maid. To fill up the measure, Charles Lamb joined them on the 7th and stayed a week. Coleridge, writing to Southey, says:

`The second day after Wordsworth came to me, dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb's stay, and still prevents me from all walks longer than a furlong. While Wordsworth, his sister, and Charles Lamb were out one evening, sitting in the arbour of T. Poole's garden, which communicates with mine, I composed these lines, with which I am pleased.'
He encloses the poem `This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,' in which he refers tenderly to his guests as `my Sister and my Friends.' It begins:
`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 dimmed mine eyes to blindness!'
In imagination he follows them as they `wander in gladness along the hill-top edge,' and thinks with special satisfaction of the pleasure granted to his gentle-hearted Charles, who had been long `in the great City pent,' an expression which he uses again in `Frost at Midnight' and which Wordsworth later adopted, both of them echoing a line of Milton. The idea of storing up happy memories for some wintry season of the heart, an idea expanded by Wordsworth in `Tintern Abbey,' and again in `I wandered lonely as a Cloud,' occurs in the lines quoted above; and Wordsworth's famous brave remark,
`Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her,'
is also anticipated in this poem when Coleridge declares,
`Henceforth I shall know

That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure,'
the wise and pure, we may be certain, being in their eyes those who love Nature. In this third Conversation Poem Coleridge has risen above the level attained in the former two; Gaudyverse is gone entirely, and unaffected simplicity, the perfection of tranquil ease, reigns without a rival. No better example, even in Wordsworth's own verse, could be found to illustrate the theory set forth three years later in the Preface to `Lyrical Ballads.' The beauty and truth of the poem and the picture it gives of Coleridge's yearning heart of love do not depend upon the fact that it was an illustrious trio whom he followed in imagination as they roved `upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge'; it is a clear boon to us that they happened to be no less than Charles Lamb and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. The significant thing is Coleridge's unselfish delight in the joys of others. Happiness of this kind is an inexhaustible treasure to which all have access."