This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison Themes

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" charts a course between isolation and imprisonment, and freedom and unity. Really, after about line 5, the speaker's imagination kicks in, and he doesn't feel so is...

Coleridge both admires and pities his friend Charles Lamb (the man to whom he dedicates "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"). He admires Lamb for living through such hardship and maintaining a "gentle...

The mystical connection between humans and nature reappears again and again in early Romantic poetry. Romanticism is in large part a reaction against the idea that man is the "rational animal" whos...

The speaker's imagination helps him to feel better about his separation from his friends, but we shouldn't neglect the healing power of time, either – especially when Coleridge goes through s...

Romanticism always raises the thorny question of "Spiritual or Religious?" With some Romantics, like that atheistic rebel Percy Shelley, the answer is easy. With Coleridge, it's not. In "This Lime-...