Biography

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in a small village in southwestern England. The son of a clergyman/school teacher, Coleridge attended his father’s school. He learned to read very early and remained a voracious reader. After his father’s death, Coleridge was sent to school in London where he met Charles Lamb, the friend to whom he wrote “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison.” An excellent scholar, Coleridge attended Cambridge University but never finished a degree. He did, however, become enthralled with radical ideas such as communal living and with fellow poet Robert Southey planned to move to America to establish a utopian community called Pantisocracy, literally meaning equal government by all. The scheme required the participants to be married couples, so Coleridge married Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey’s fiancée. Having married more for convenience than love, Coleridge was unhappy in his marriage, as presumably was his wife, and the two eventually separated.

Coleridge and his wife Sara lived for a short time in Nether Stowey, a village near the Bristol Channel. Coleridge had met William Wordsworth who lived nearby at Alfoxden with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. While living here, Coleridge produced some of his finest poetry, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison.”

Throughout his life Coleridge suffered from poor health and probably from poor mental health as well. By the early 1800’s he had become addicted to opium. His addiction became so severe that he moved in with a doctor in London who helped him keep his drug use under control.

In his later years, Coleridge delivered a highly successful series of lectures on Shakespeare, wrote respected works of literary theory and criticism, and developed a reputation as an intellectual.

“The Eolian Harp”

This poem follows the pattern of observation of nature leading to a meditation. Notice the descriptive details of the cot [cottage] and its peaceful natural surroundings. Coleridge uses images of sound and smell as well as sight to help his audience imagine the scene he describes.

At the beginning of stanza 2 (line 13), Coleridge focuses attention on the lute (another word for the eolian harp—also sometimes spelled “aeolian”) that sits in the window.

In stanza 2 Coleridge writes a fundamental statement of Romantic mysticism. The speaker exclaims, “O! the one Life within us and abroad.” Here he recognizes, as Wordsworth did in “Tintern Abbey,” the spiritual presence (the “one Life”) that is “within us” (inside human beings) and “abroad” (in the things around us—in nature).

In stanza 4 Coleridge creates one of the central images of Romantic poetry. His speaker asks, “What if all of animated [living] nature be but organic Harps.…” All of living nature, including people, is compared to harps. He notes that the harps are “diversely framed”; people don’t look alike just as all harps do not look alike. As the wind blows over the harp and enlivens the strings to create music, the spiritual presence that is in the world moves over people and enlivens their Imaginations. See lines 47 and 48.

Rather than ending the poem with the meditation section of stanzas 2–4, Coleridge adds a concluding stanza that takes the audience back to the cottage setting, thus framing the poem. After indulging in his intellectual, philosophical musings, his wife Sara brings him back down to earth. The last stanza specifically refers to God and to Christ, revealing of Christian religious beliefs. In this poem, Coleridge identifies the spiritual presence of Romantic mysticism as God.

Coleridge’s cottage at Nether Stowey.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Coleridge’s long narrative poem in ballad style, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” proved to be one of the more popular works in Lyrical Ballads. In this poem Coleridge takes an idea he proposes in theoretical form in “The Eolian Harp” and plays out the idea in a story. Having described the world of nature infused with a spiritual presence, the “one Life within us and abroad,” Coleridge states in “The Eolian Harp” lines 31 and 32:

In the story of the Ancient Mariner we learn what happens to a person, the Mariner, who does not “love all things in a world” filled with a divine presence.

Modern statue of the Ancient Mariner with the albatross around his neck.

From one perspective, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is an adventure story with gothic elements: supernatural events, the spirits, reanimated bodies, the Mariner’s mystical abilities. From another perspective, it’s the story of a man who had to learn to respect the spiritual presence in nature, the “one Life within us and abroad.”

“This Lime-tree Bower My Prison”

In the autobiographical and intimate “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge writes about the experience of sitting, unwillingly, beneath a tree’s overspreading branches, feeling as if the branches form a room, a bower. Because he didn’t want to be there, he characterizes the bower as a prison. Coleridge’s wife had accidently spilled boiling milk on his foot, and because of his injury he was unable to accompany his friends, including Charles Lamb, on a hike. Coleridge particularly wanted his friend Lamb, who lived in London, to experience nature. The complaining, grumbling tone comes through in the first two lines of the poem:

In lines 2–5, Coleridge explains why he is so upset about missing the hike:

This idea is very similar to Wordsworth’s explanation of gathering “life and food for future years” in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

Although Coleridge complains about missing the walk, in stanza 3 he finds a consolation: he’s found nature in his “bower.” He realizes he can see the beauty of nature where he sits. He learns that “nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure.” Again he echoes a line from Wordsworth’s “Lines”: “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.”

Resources