The poem here turns into an imaginative journey as the poet begins to use sensuous description and tactile imagery. The clues to solving these two mysteries—what is being hinted at in "This Lime-Tree Bower" and why it must not be stated directly—lie, among other places, in the sources and intertexts, including Dodd's Thoughts, of that anomalous word, "prison. Oedipus ironically curses the unknown killer, and then he and Creon call-in Tiresias to discover the murderer's identity. At 7 in the evening these days, in New York and around the world, the sound of spoons banging on pans, of clapping, whistling, and whooping, is just such a sound. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, " is an extended meditation on immobility. They walk through a dark forest and past a dramatic waterfall. Whatever beauties nature may offer to delight us, writes Cowper, we cannot rightly appreciate them in our fallen state, enslaved as we are to our sensuous appetites and depraved emotions by the sin of Adam: "Chains are the portion of revolted man, / Stripes and a dungeon; and his body serves/ The triple purpose" (5. Facing bankruptcy, on 4 February 1777 Dodd forged a bond from Chesterfield for £ 4, 200 and was arrested soon afterwards. "The Dungeon" comprises a soliloquy spoken by a nobleman's eldest son, Albert, who has been the victim of a failed assassination attempt, unjust arrest, and imprisonment by his jealous younger brother, Osorio. In this brief poem, entitled "To a Friend, Together with an Unfinished Poem, " Coleridge states how his relationship to his own next oldest sister, Anne, the "sister more beloved" and "play-mate when we both were clothed alike" of "Frost at Midnight" (42-43), helps him to understand Lamb's feelings. His exclusion is not adventitious. Popular interest in the aesthetics of criminal violence, facetiously piqued by Thomas De Quincey in his 1829 Blackwood's essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, " can plausibly be credited with helping to keep Dodd's poem in print throughout the early nineteenth century. Reading the poem this way shines some light (though of course I'm only speaking personally here) on why I have always found its ostensible message of hope and joy undercut by something darker and unreconciled, the sense of something unspoken in the poem that is traded off somehow, some cost of expiation.
What Wordsworth thought of the encounter we do not know, but the juxtaposition of the sulky Lamb, ordinarily overflowing with facetious charm, and the Wordsworths, especially the vivacious Dorothy, must have presented a striking contrast. The main idea poet wants to convey through the above verses is that there is the presence of God in nature. Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd. —in such a place as this / It has nothing else to do but, drip! Motura remos alnus et Phoebo obvia.
He has dreamed that he fell into this chasm, a portent of his imminent death at the hands of Osorio, who characerizes himself, in the third person, as a madman: "He walk'd alone/ And phantasies, unsought for, troubl'd him. This is as much as to say that the act appeared largely motiveless, like the Mariner's. Thou, my Ernst, Ingenuous Youth! Suspicion, arbitrary arrest, and incarceration are prominent features of The Borderers, [14] but one passage from Act V of Osorio is of particular relevance here. Join today and never see them again. Comparing the beautiful garden of lime-trees to prison, the poet feels completely crippled for being unable to view all the beautiful things that he too could have enjoyed if he had not met with an accident that evening. At the inquest the following day, Mary was adjudged insane and, to prevent her being remanded to the horrors of Bedlam, Charles agreed to assume legal guardianship and pay for her confinement in a private asylum in Islington.
Their values, their tastes, their very style of living, as well as their own circle of friends were, in her eyes, an incomprehensible and irritating distraction from, if not a serious impediment to, the distingished future that her worldlier ambitions had envisioned for her gifted spouse in the academy, the press, and politics. Wind down, perchance, In Seneca's play the underworldly grove of trees and pools is the place from which the answer to the mystery is dragged, unwillingly and unhappily, into the light. It's there, though: the Yggdrasilic Ash-tree possessing a structural role in the underside of the landscape ('the Ash from rock to rock/Flings arching like a bridge, that branchless ash/Unsunn'd' [12-14]). Midmost stands a tree of mighty girth, and with its heavy shade overwhelms the lesser trees and, spreading its branches with mighty reach, it stands, the solitary guardian of the wood. While "gentle-hearted Charles" is mentioned in the first dozen lines of both epistolary versions, he is not imagined to be the exclusive auditor and spectator of the last rook winging homeward across the setting sun at the end. For thou hast pinedThe poem imagines the descending sun making the heath gleam. With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up.