This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison Essay Questions

The speaker compares his bower to a prison. Discuss the significance of this metaphor.

Early in the poem, the speaker compares the bower where he sits to a prison, complaining that he is restrained there against his will. However, this comparison grows increasingly ironic throughout the poem, as the speaker grows to appreciate the bower's beauty, and finds it a place of imaginative freedom rather than prison-like restriction. The very weakness of the "prison" metaphor is evidence of how little attention the speaker has paid to his surroundings. Coleridge uses a somewhat cliche and exaggerated metaphor rather than a vivid, fresh one in order to convey that his speaker is inattentive to the bower. Once he has paid more attention to it, he uses original, specific descriptions and ceases to use the prison metaphor.

Use examples from all three stanzas to describe the relationship between empathy and imagination in this poem.

In the poem's first stanza, the speaker displays powers of vivid imagination, but lacks empathy: he vividly envisions his friends' journey through the woods, but fails to empathize with them by imagining their emotions or feelings. Instead, he privileges his own reaction. This reaction he contains within parentheses, showing that it is his own, and making clear that he refuses to delve into his friends' internal lives. However, by the second stanza, imagination has produced empathy. The speaker imagines his friends' "gladness," and reflects with tenderness on Charles's hardships. This empathetic outpouring allows him to identify with, personify, and address even inanimate objects, extending his compassion for Charles to the sun and the flowers as well. In the poem's final stanza, the speaker's empathy for his friends has led him to feel more generous and open-minded as a whole, so that he perceives his physical surroundings more vividly and positively. Thus, the speaker's imagining of the natural world eventually leads him to empathize with others, which leads him back to closely observing the world as it is.