"Preface to Lyrical Ballads" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"

In William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he discusses the art of poetry, exploring the ways in which poems are beneficial for all men and analyzing poets themselves. One of Wordsworth’s main points is that poetry, which he defines as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, should detail incidents from everyday life life and be written in common language so that all men can understand and relate.

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, parallels the ideas set forth in Preface to Lyrical Ballads in a number of ways. First of all, Coleridge’s work is written mostly in plain and simple language; there are no words which stand out as exceedingly lofty. Wordsworth’s states in his Preface that this kind of language, “arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language” (148). The speaker in Coleridge’s work has suffered an injury that causes him to stay in the garden while his friends, “whom [he] never more may meet again, on springy health, along the hill-top edge, wander in gladness” (294). Many readers would be able to identify with this feeling of being left behind and not fitting in to a group. Another aspect of writing that Wordsworth highlights is the fact that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (153). This happens to the speaker throughout This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, as he sits alone in the garden and contemplates his state of being and the nature surrounding him. At the end, the speaker finds peace with his state in life, physically and emotionally; this happens when, in Wordsworth’s words, he follows “the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affectations of our nature” (149). The speaker realizes that “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure; No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty!” (295). He may not be in the company of his friends, but he finds beauty and love in the garden.