The first few lines of Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison” bring up the interesting idea of physical nature vs. the memory of nature. Coleridge states that the physical nature he is in, the lime-tree bower, is his prison and 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!” I think it’s interesting that Coleridge places such an emphasis on the memories he’s associated with nature, rather than the nature itself. Many other poems we’ve studied so far focus on a single aspect of nature, or take a scene and explore it. Coleridge is working in the opposite direction—he is stuck in a scene, so instead he takes his memories and explores them throughout the poem. The speaker seems to come to terms with this concept in the final stanza, in the lines “A delight/Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad/As I myself were there!” The lime-tree bower may be a prison physically but it cannot contain the thoughts and memories of its prisoner and thus the speaker is able to mentally create a world in which his friends wander. Nature becomes something that can be intangibly experienced, rather than the very physical concept it is often defined by.
“And what if all of animate nature / Be but organic harps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweep / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of All? ~ Coleridge “The Eolian Harp”
ReplyDeleteVictoria’s claim, “Nature becomes something that can be intangibly experienced, rather than the very physical concept it is often defined by,” is, in my opinion, strongly supported by the above stanza from “The Eolian Harp.” Coleridge, by questioning the spirituality of nature, also questions its relationship to man; a subject about which we have discussed at-length in class. As opposed to objectifying nature, Coleridge takes the position of Wordsworth in exemplifying its vastness (i.e. the stark inability to quantify it). As Wordsworth worshiped the Celandine for its humility and pastoralism, Coleridge too, albeit through a different lens, glorifies the simple power of nature. The position of Wordsworth and Coleridge circles back to our initial question: how are man and nature related. Did, according to Genesis, God give man dominion over nature to use it for self-gain or manage it for mutual preservation? A difficult, if not unanswerable question, I think Wordsworth and Coleridge would side with the later and argue man’s destiny is irrevocably attached to that of nature.