Samuel Coleridge’s Lime-tree Bower Through The Lens of Wordsworth’s "Nuns Fret not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room"

In Samuel Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the speaker views the lime-tree bower he sits under as a prison, despite its beautiful description. He wishes to venture out with his friends and see the beautiful nature they will see, and as a result of desperately wanting to be somewhere else, he misses the beauty right in front of him and interprets the lime-tree bower as a prison. The speaker’s imagination turns something beautiful, the lime-tree bower, into something dark and suffocating. His mind transforms the nature around him and his negative thoughts entrap him in a prison he creates for himself. In Wordsworth’s poem, “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” the speaker also explores the symbol of a prison as compared to daily responsibilities in one’s role, and the structure those routines impress on one’s life. The speaker in this poem warns against letting one’s mind have too much freedom, and encourages finding comfort in structure. Examining the speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” with the wisdom of the speaker in “Nuns Fret Not” reveals where the former goes wrong in his reading of the lime-tree bower. This essay will argue that the symbol of the lime-tree bower and the prison in both works reveals the capability of one’s imagination to transform one’s surroundings for better or for worse.

In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the speaker allows the setting of a beautiful lime-tree bower to be distorted by his negative thoughts. He laments that “here must [he] remain” while his friends go for a walk he cannot join because he is injured, and laments that he has “lost/ Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/ Most sweet to my remembrance even when age/ Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness” (Coleridge 2-5). This lime-tree bower is usually very beautiful to him, but the sorrow he feels because he cannot go with his friends overwhelms reality, and the speaker’s mind turns the setting into a prison. The speaker in “Nuns Fret Not” warns against allowing the imagination to take over because of its capability to shape one’s subjective reality into a dark place. He sympathizes with those “who have felt the weight of too much liberty” because they are distressed with a mind that is too free (Wordsworth 13). The speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is experiencing this state of distress and allowing his imagination to run free and take over, turning his lime-tree bower into a prison.

Both speakers conclude that the prisons they describe in their poems are not prisons at all, revealing the power of the mind to create a dark environment or to view things positively based on one’s perspective. As the speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is recounting all of the things he will miss out on during his friends’ walk, he thinks, “most glad,/ [of his] gentle-hearted Charles! for [Charles] hast pined/ And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,/ In the great City pent” (Coleridge 27-30). In the following stanza, “A delight/ Comes sudden on [his] heart, and [he is] glad/ As [he] [him]self were there!” (44-46). In realizing that his friend Charles rarely gets to experience nature due to his position in the city and probably always longs for it, the speaker opens his eyes to reality and sees the beauty of the lime-tree bower and the nature he is in at present. The lime-tree bower is no prison at all, and his misreading of the symbol is corrected with the thought of Charles’s rare exposures to nature. The speaker’s perspective changes when he understands how fortunate he is to be sitting in nature at the moment. Similarly, in “Nuns Fret Not” after listing all of the seemingly restrictive duties that various beings are trapped by, the speaker assures the reader that “in truth the prison, into which we doom/ Ourselves, no prison is” (Wordsworth 8-9). The structures of one’s every day life is not a prison, but a framework within which one finds comfort and joy. An environment or structure can be transformed into a prison if the mind is free enough to do so. However, the speaker shows that even the menial day-to-day structures that appear to be a prison are actually not, when looked at with a positive perspective. This notion is dramatized in Coleridge’s poem with the stark contrast between the speaker’s feelings about the symbol of the lime-tree bower at the beginning of the poem and at the end. Anything can be transformed into a prison by one’s mind, and the power of one’s subjective reality.

The speaker in “Nuns Fret Not” imparts valuable wisdom about how a mind that is too free can turn anything into a prison. The structure he finds solace in is the strict Sonnet form of the poem itself, but the poem suggests that everyone can benefit from structure because it grounds the liberty of the mind. The speaker suggests that a mind that is too free is weighed down, which is illustrated in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” The mind of the speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower” transforms the beautiful nature setting into a prison because it is too free, and only once the speaker’s feelings are placed in the context of a contrast between his situation and Charles’s situation is he able to ground his imagination and realize the beauty in his surroundings. The speaker in Coleridge’s poem comes to a point where he can understand what the speaker in Wordsworth’s poem means when he says “Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)/ Who have felt the weight of too much liberty/ Should find brief solace there, as [he] ha[s] found” (Wordsworth 12-14). The speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower” has a mind that is too free at the beginning, but he is able to find comfort in the lime-tree bower and by the end no longer views it as a prison at all, the same way that the speaker in “Nuns Fret Not” finds solace in structure and does not view strict forms as prisons.

The speaker’s misreading of the lime-tree bower as a prison is a result of his mind being too free and distorting his perception of reality. This concern of a mind too free is expressed in “Nuns Fret Not,” which illustrates that anything can be transformed into a prison if one’s mind has too much liberty. In examining the misreading of the lime-tree bower, the argument that “Nuns Fret Not” puts forward reveals a lot about the power of a mind too free to alter reality. Both works explore the prisons that one can entrap themselves in when weighed down by negative thoughts, and how one can easily misread his or her reality.