The Rhetorical Occasion of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’

Abstract

Prison’ present it as a self-consolatory exercise in which Coleridge’s sympathetic imagination delivers him from an imprisoning solitude. Here I will argue alternately, first, that Charles Lamb rather than Coleridge himself is the principal subject of the text’s consolatory enterprise, and second that the consolations offered are in important respects less imaginative than theological – more specifically, that they are implicitly but crucially Unitarian. Reeve Parker has anticipated my argument by casting ‘Lime-Tree Bower’ as ‘a consolation based in essentially Christian tradition’ and offered to Lamb with an eye to Mary Lamb’s murder of their mother, the ‘strange calamity’ which Coleridge mentions Lamb struggling to overcome. Parker draws his interpretive model not from Coleridge’s Unitarianism, however, but from ‘the Christian meditative tradition that Coleridge encountered in extensive reading of seventeenth-century Puritan and Anglican writers’ (Parker, 27). Conceding Coleridge’s Unitarianism, Paul Magnuson brilliantly reads the blessing to Lamb in ‘LimeTree Bower’ as ‘not only a private gesture, but also a public stance, a Unitarian and dissenting stance against an established order that has corrupted Christianity’. But Magnuson is concerned with Unitarianism primarily for its contribution to the text’s carefully hedged political self-presentation. And he also writes that ‘the poem traces Coleridge’s emergence from a private bower and prison ... through the agency of the Wordsworths and Lamb’ (Magnuson, 62), a claim which again emphasizes Lamb redeeming Coleridge rather than the other way around. Although the Wordsworths participated in the walk recounted in ‘Lime-Tree Bower’, it remains Lamb, we should recall, to whom the poem is inscribed. We should notice similarly that Coleridge turns to his own situation after he finishes depicting Lamb’s joyous vision of ‘the Almighty Spirit’ (line 43), so that his own reconciliation merely unfolds a lesson established by his reflections on Lamb. ‘LimeTree Bower’ certainly dramatizes Coleridge himself achieving redemptive understanding. But the text’s consolatory project centers on Lamb, I believe, and takes its bearings from Lamb’s religious attitudes. That is why the Unitarianism that Coleridge shared with Lamb, but about which they also disagreed, helped set the terms of Coleridge’s address to his suffering friend.