Nature/prison, God/poet

I wonder whether the speaker of “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” still thinks of it as a prison by the end of the poem. While the poem starts out with this title and then the assertion in the second line, the poem ends on the rather celebratory line “No sound is dissonant which tells of Life” (76). He is sad, at first, that he’ll be missing the experience of being in nature—“I have lost/Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/Most sweet to my remembrance” (2-4)—but that does not stop him from imagining it clearly. His description in the first stanza of the “branchless ash/Unsunned and damp” (13-4) or the “green file of long lank weeks” (17) is so detailed that the reader may even forget that the speaker is missing out on the scene at the time of writing—of course, his past experiences of nature come together in the poem. The walk that the narrator imagines for his friends continues in the second stanza, framed with such certainty that it’s difficult to realize that this is not happening—he writes “my friends emerge” (20) not, ‘I imagine my friends emerge’ or anything that would indicate that he has no proof of what is happening.

His ability to imagine the scene so completely is almost proof that he doesn’t need to be in nature—in fact, it makes me think it may be better that he isn’t, so that the natural world he’s envisioning in such detail does not disappoint. He seems to convince himself, at least: by the final stanza he recognizes that “’Tis well to be bereft of promised good” (65). While he is deprived of the temporal beauty of nature and of the perhaps more lasting beauty of the memory it would inspire, we are rewarded with the beauty of the poem, which will last longer than either the walk or the memory would have. That the narrator is forced to not join his friends is beneficial for the reader, who would not get to read the poem otherwise. This aligns with one of the ideas from his lecture on “Mechanic vs. Organic Form,” on “the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination” (p. 501)—the speaker needs the “prison” to become a poet, needs the limitations in order to use his imagination.

No matter how hidden, though, his friends of the poem are the friends of his mind and not his actual friends. Thus the speaker creates a world in the poem that is parallel to actual reality—his imagined Charlie being not the ‘real’ Charlie, and the plants/landscapes he writes of being a combination of his memories and ideas about what it must be like where they are. Of course, this occurs when a poet writes any poem—we always have the layer of ‘speaker’ between the poem and the author; it is just doubled, in a sense, in this poem.

This speaker takes ownership over the natural world—or at least the version of it that he creates—in the final stanza when he describes the rook and claims “I blessed it!” (70). Having begun to address nature directly in the second stanza, his creation of the world of the poem is Godlike at the end. He puts himself on the same level as Nature; he doesn’t even need to be in it to create it. This idea is in line with how Wordsworth ends the Prelude—it is ultimately the man’s/poet’s imagination that makes Nature/life beautiful, moreso than it is nature by itself. Imagination is man’s version of a Godlike creation. The association of the poet with God carries over to “Frost at Midnight”—even just simply in the poem’s father/son premise. The speaker describes God has having an “eternal language” that he “Utters” (60, 61). God’s use of “language” to create echoes the poet’s—and the idea that God will “mould/Thy spirit” (63-4) with these words suggests the Romantic view of poetry as able to change the world through continued creation—a rather godlike notion.

Coleridge also addresses the connection of God/Nature/Poet in his essay “On Symbol and Allegory”---“The fact, therefore, that the mind of man in its own primary and constituional forms represents the laws of nature, is a mystery which of itself should suffice to make us religious: for it is a problem of which God is the only solution, God, the one before all, and of all, and through all!” (p. 503). This goes with the ideas of the poem, connecting nature with God and, then, with the poet---suggesting that God works through the poet or as the poet or in some combination of these ideas. Either way, the divinity of nature translates to divinity of the poet when it is clear that the poet’s imagination reigns over even nature, as it seems to in “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”