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It should also interest anyone seeking to trace the submerged canoncial influences of what Franco Moretti calls "the great unread"
(227)—the hundreds of novels, plays, and poems that have sunk to the bottom of time's sea over the last three hundred years
and left behind not even a ripple on the surface of literary history. Despite their current invisibility, the turbulence of their
passage (often vigorous while it lasted) may have affected the course of other vessels safely moored, at present, in one or
another harbor of canonicity. In this essay I will first describe the circumstances and publication history of Dodd's poem, and
then point out and try to explain its influence on one such canonical work, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison." Those interested only in the composition and publication history of
The wide range of literary sources contributing to the composition of "This Lime-Tree Bower " makes the poem something of an
intertextual harlequin. Its topographical imagery is clearly indebted to the moralized landscapes of William Lisle Bowles and
William Cowper, if not to an entire tradition of loco-descriptive poetry extending back to George Dyer's "Gronger's Hill."
Christopher Miller cites precursors in Gray's "Elegy" and Milton's
Devotional literature like Cowper's has yielded a rich crop of sources for Coleridge's poetry and prose in general, but only
Michael Kirkham has thought to winnow this material for more precise literary analogues to the controlling metaphor announced in
the very title of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and introduced in its opening lines, as first published in 1800: "Well, they
are gone, and here must I remain, / This lime-tree bower my prison!"
Kirkham has traced several parallels between "This Lime-Tree Bower" and Vaughan's poem, with its cheering
reflections on the author's dead friends, who have preceded him into paradise—"the world of light." Given these points of
correspondence, there seems little doubt that it served as one of Coleridge's sources. In form and style, however, Vaughan's poem
and Coleridge's are "so far apart that not to notice the virtual identity of theme is excusable," writes Kirkham, adding that "the
crucial difference [. . .] is that Vaughan's departed friends are dead" (130).
Another crucial difference, I would argue, is that Vaughan is neither in prison nor alluding to it. William Dodd, by contrast, is
composing his poem in Newgate, a fact his readers are never allowed to forget. As his opening lines indicate, his friends are very
much alive—it is the poet who is about to meet his Maker:
Not just in these opening lines (rather more grandiloquent and verbose
than Coleridge's, admittedly), but also in form (blank verse), setting (a prison), scenery (imagined or visionary landscapes) and
style (a mixture of declamation, apostrophe, and meditation), Dodd's poem is a much closer match to Coleridge's than is
Vaughan's.
Dodd had been a prominent and well-to-do London minister, a chaplain to the king and tutor to the young Lord Chesterfield. His expensive tastes, however, had driven him so deeply into debt that when a particularly lucrative pulpit came into the disposal of the crown in 1774, he attempted to bribe a member of court to secure it. The ensuing scandal filled the columns of the London press, and Dodd fled to Geneva for a time to escape the glare of publicity. After his return to England his situation became more desperate as his extravagance grew. Facing bankruptcy, on 4 February 1777 Dodd forged a bond from Chesterfield for £ 4,200 and was arrested soon afterwards. He was tried and found guilty on 19 February. Despite an eloquent and remorseful plea for clemency, he was sentenced to death by hanging, the standard punishment at that time for his offense.
The bribery scandal of two years before had apparently not diminished Dodd's popularity with a large segment of the London
populace. According to one account, the newspapers were overwhelmed with letters on his behalf. Citizens "of all ranks," including
"members of several charities which had been benefitted by him," as well as the lord mayor and common council of the city,
gathered upwards of thirty thousand signatures for a petition to the king that filled twenty-three sheeets of parchment (Knapp and
Baldwin, 58). Samuel Johnson even wrote to request clemency. (His letter is included in most printed editions of
Most prison confessions like Dodd's did not survive their first appearance in the gallows broadsides and ballads hawked among the
crowds of onlookers attending the public executions of their purported authors. Ephemeral by its very nature, most of this
material has been lost to us. Some of the rare exceptions managed to survive by their inclusion in the particularly scandalous
cases appearing in various editions of
There is a great deal in
In verses that, stylistically as well as thematically, look forward to Coleridge's reflections on an "Almighty Spirit" who "makes/
Spirits perceive his presence" in nature's splendors ("This Lime-Tree Bower," 43-44) and "from eternity doth teach/ Himself in
all, and all things in himself" by uttering "[t]he lovely shapes and sounds intelligible" of nature's "eternal language" ("Frost
at Midnight," 59-62), Dodd observes how amid Spring's emblems of resurrection, "All things 'round/ Arise in brightest proof" of
"[a] pardoning Deity and future world" (5.221). "I see it, feel it,/ Thro' all my faculties, thro' all my powers,/ Pervading
irresistible" (5.214-216), he writes, anticipating the negative cadences of Coleridge’s “Dejection” ode, “I see, not feel, how
beautiful they are” (38):
Do we have any external evidence that Coleridge had heard of Dodd, let alone read his poem? We do, but it appears late. On 20
August 1805, in Malta, he laments that "the Theses of the Universities of Oxford & Cambridge are so generally drawn from
events of the Day/Stimuli of passing Interests / Dr Dodds, Jane Gibbses, Hatfields, Bonapartes, Pitts, &c &c &c
&c" (Coburn, 2.2651 [Text]). Kathleen Coburn, in her note to this entry, indicates that Coleridge would probably have heard of
Dodd as a "
Dodd seems to have been astonished by the impetuosity of his crime. In his plea for clemency (the transcript of which was included
in
But Coleridge resembled Dodd in more than temperament, as a glance at a typical
In the fourteen months leading up to the week of 7-14 July 1797, when Coleridge wrote his first draft of "This Lime-Tree Bower,"
the poet experienced a financial crisis similar to the one facing Dodd in 1751, a crisis that had led him to confess his fears of
"the Debtors' side of Newgate" to Poole seven months before, in December 1796. His first venture into periodical publication,
Coleridge was now devoting much of his time to the literary equivalent of brick-laying: reviewing Gothic novels in which, he writes
William Lisle Bowles, "dungeons, and old castles, & solitary Houses by the Sea Side, & Caverns, & Woods, &
extraordinary characters, & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery have crowded on me—even to surfeiting" (Griggs 1.318).
He had begun his play
One significant difference between Dodd's situation and Coleridge's, of course, is that Dodd resorted to criminal forgery to pay
his debts and Coleridge did not. While the poet's notorious plagiarisms offer an intriguing analogue to the clergyman's forging of
checks, these proclivities had yet to announce themselves in Coleridge's work. Instead, as I hope to show in larger context, the
two cases are linked by the temptation to exploit a tutor/pupil relationship for financial gain: Dodd's forged bond on young
Chesterfield finds its analogue in Coleridge's shrewd appraisal of the Lloyd family's deep pockets. Charles Lloyd, Jr., who was
just starting out as a poet, had joined the household at Nether Stowey and become a pupil to Coleridge because he considered the
older man a mentor as well as a friend, something of an elder brother-poet. In that capacity, Coleridge had arranged to include
some of Lloyd's verses in his forthcoming
This statement casts a less than flattering light upon Coleridge's relationship with Lloyd, going back to his enthusiastic avowals
of temperamental and intellectual affinity as early as September and October of 1796 (Griggs 1.236-37; 240). It implies that the
inclusion of his pupil's poetry in the tutor's forthcoming volume was motivated as much by greed as by admiration, and helps
explain Coleridge's extraordinary insistence that his young wife, infant son, and nursemaid share their cramped living quarters at
Nether Stowey with this unmanageably delirious young man several months after his tutoring was, supposedly, at an end.I had yesterday a letter from Charles which expressed in the fullest manner the enjoyment of his
present residence with Coleridge who he says is still more attentive than ever & that he has resumed his former plan
of entering into a regular course of studying the languages with him to which occupation he devotes all his mornings &
that his apartments are very snug and comfortable.
Professor Jackson informs me that the letter is at the Jerwood
Center in Grasmere. The supposition of renewed study is supported by Coleridge's statement to Cottle, in a letter of early
April 1796, that he was in receipt of £10 from Lloyd, Sr. Lloyd had arrived at Nether Stowey after holidays on 22 February and
departed for Litchfield at some point between 16 and 23 March, a period of about a month. The original amount agreed upon the
previous October for both Lloyd's tutoring and room and board was £80 per annum, or approximately £7 per month, so that £ 10
for the month of February-March would indicate that tutoring was included in the payment, as well as a generous
gratuity.
Wordsworth's impact on Coleridge during their first extended encounters, beginning at Racedown for a period of three weeks or more
ending 28 June and again at Nether Stowey from 2 to 16 July, can hardly be overestimated, and seems to have played a significant
role in his eventual break with his younger brother poets. "I speak with heartfelt sincerity," he wrote Cottle on 8 June, "&
(I think) unblinded judgement, when I tell you, that I feel myself a
Coleridge's early and continuing obsession with fraternal models of poetic friendship has long been recognized by his biographers,
and constitutes a major part of psychobiographical studies like Norman Fruman's
Like “This Lime-Tree Bower,”
Elsewhere, benedictions are invoked on Mary Dodd not only as spouse, but as friend and pupil as well:
That
Readers have detected something sinister about "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison": its very title implies criminality. As Rachel
Crawford points out, the "aesthetic unity" of the sendentary poet's imaginative re-creation of the route pursued by his
friends—William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and (in the two surviving MS versions) Coleridge's wife, Sarah
Taken together, writes Crawford, these two half-hidden events "suggest that a violent history of the human subject" may lie at the heart of the poem (190), and she identifies this violent history with the poem's abjection of the feminine and the "domestic" (199). While not quarreling with this reading—indeed, while keeping one eye steadily focused on Mary Lamb's matricidal outburst—I would like to broaden our attention to include more of Coleridge's early life and his fraternal relations with poets like Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd. "This Lime-Tree Bower" commemorates a pivotal day in the poet's maturation as an artist: the beginning of the end of his affiliation with Charles Lamb and the false simplicity of a poetic style uniting Coleridge with Lamb and Charles Lloyd as brother poets, and the end of the beginning of a more intense, more durable, and far more life-altering affiliation with William Wordsworth, Lamb's and Lloyd's older, and presumably more gifted and mature, fraternal substitute. This transition in Coleridge's personal and artistic life is registered through a complex imagistic rhetoric of familial violence dating from his childhood, as well as topographical intertexts allegorizing distinct themes of transgression, abandonment, remorse, and salvation reactivated, on this occasion, by a serendipitous combination of events and circumstances, including Mary Lamb's crime. The first of these features, of course, is the incogruous notion, highlighted in Coleridge's title, of a lime-tree bower being a "prison" at all.
The general idea behind Coleridge's choice of title is obvious. Indeed, it is announced in the first three lines of the earliest
surving MS copy of the poem and the first two lines of the second and all subsequent printed versions: "Well, they are gone, and
here must I remain, / This lime-tree bower my prison!" Incapacitated by his injury, the poet transfers the efficient cause of his
confinement from his wife's spilt milk to the lime-tree bower itself. But why? Why should he strive so deliberately for an
impression of
In the June [sic July] of 1797, some long-expected Friends paid a visit to the Author's Cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which prevented him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One Evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the Garden-Bower.
The addition of this brief paratext only highlights the mystery it was meant to dispel: if the poet was incapacitated by mishap,
why use the starkly melodramatic word "prison," suggesting that he has been forcibly separated from his friends and making us
wonder what the "prisoner" might have done to deserve such treatment? He has not only been "jailed" for no apparent reason,
without
The "histrionic plangencies" of "This Lime-Tree Bower" puzzle readers like Michael Kirkham, who finds "the emotions of the speaker
[to be] in excess of the circumstances as presented": [T]he extremity of the word "prison," and the large elegiac gesture
of "Friends, whom I never more may meet again"; these feelings, these misgivings, on an occasion of temporary deprivation are
not only extreme in their exposure of a naked self-pity but inexplicable. We read these and the following lines with the
mental reservation of a question needing an answer. (125)
A similar, gnawing self-doubt is expressed in several
passages from Cowper's
Whatever beauties nature may offer to delight us, writes Cowper, we cannot rightly appreciate them in our fallen state, enslaved as
we are to our sensuous appetites and depraved emotions by the sin of Adam: "
Kirkham seeks an explanation for Coleridge's obliquely expressed "misgivings" by examining the "rendering and arangement" of the poem's imagined scenes, which "have the aspect of a mental journey," "a ritual of descent and ascent" (125). The "roaring dell" (9, 10)—"rifted Dell" in both MS versions—into which the poet's friends first descend, writes Kirkham, "is a psychologically specific, though covert, image of a spiritual Hell" reinforced "by the description of the subsequent ascent into light" (126)—that is, in Coleridge's words, his friends' emergence atop the Quantock Hills, "beneath the wide wide Heaven." Unfortunately, says Kirkham, "the poem has not disclosed a sufficient personal reason for [this] emotion" (126), a failing that Kirkham does not address. He does, however, recognize that this topography's "metaphorical significance," "a matter of hints and indirections and parentheses," leads naturally to a second question: "What prompts evasive tactics of this kind?" (128).
The clues to solving these two mysteries—what is being hinted at in "This Lime-Tree Bower" and why it must not be stated
directly—lie, among other places, in the sources and intertexts, including Dodd's
At Racedown, a month before Lamb's visit, Coleridge and Wordsworth had exchanged readings of their work. Wordsworth had read his
play,
"The Dungeon" comprises a soliloquy spoken by a nobleman's eldest son, Albert, who has been the victim of a failed assassination
attempt, unjust arrest, and imprisonment by his jealous younger brother, Osorio. Albert's soliloquy is a condensed version of
"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," unfolding its vision of a "benignant" natural landscape from within the confines of a real
prison and touching upon themes that are treated more expansively in the conversation poem, especially regarding Nature's power to
heal the despondent mind and counter the soul-disfiguring effects of confinement:
In "This Lime-Tree Bower" the designated recipient of such healing and harmonizing "ministrations" is not, as we might expect, the
"angry Spirit" of the incarcerated Mary Lamb, the agent of "evil and pain / And strange calamity" (31-32) confined at Hackney, but
her "wander[ing]" younger brother, "gentle-hearted Charles" (28), who in "winning" (30) his own way back to peace of mind,
according to Coleridge, has "pined / And hunger'd after Nature, many a year, / In the great City pent" (28-30). Although the poet
invokes Milton's description of Satan's arrival in Eden after leaving Pandemonium (
Ten months were to pass before this invitation could be accepted. In "This Lime-Tree Bower" Nature is charged—literally,
through imperatives—with the task of healing Charles's gentle, but imprisoned heart. After passing through
This view caps an itinerary that Coleridge not only imagines Charles to be pursuing, along with William, Dorothy, and (in both the
Lloyd and Southey manuscript versions) Sarah herself, but that he in fact told his friends to pursue.
Allegorized itineraries were an integral part of Coleridge's
Was that "deeming" justified? We shall never know. Perhaps Coleridge's friends never ventured further than the dell. Perhaps they spent the afternoon in a tavern and never followed his directions at all. As Adam Potkay puts it, "Coleridge's aesthetic joy"—and ours, we might add—"depends upon the silence of the Lambs" (109). With its final sighting of a bird presumably beheld by absent friends the poem anticipates but never achieves intersubjective closure: these are friends that the speaker indeed never meets again within the homodiegetic reality of his utterance, friends who, once the poem has ended, can never confirm or deny a sharing of perception he has "deemed" to be fact. Whatever he may imagine these absent wanderers to be perceiving, the poet remains imprisoned in his solitary thoughts as his poem comes to an end.
Coleridge tries to finesse this missing corroboration almost from the start. As early as line 16, not long after he pictures his
friends "wind[ing] down,
In lines 43-67, however, visionary topographies give way to transfigured perceptions of the speaker's immediate environment incited
by his having been forced to lift his captive soul to "contemplate / With lively joy the joys" he could not share (67-68): "Nor in
this bower, / This little lime-tree bower," he says, "have I not mark'd / Much that has sooth'd [him]" (46-47) during his
imaginative flight to his friend's side. The glowing foliage, illuminated by the same solar radiance in which he pictures Charles
Lamb standing at that very moment, "[s]ilent with swimming sense," and the singing of the "humble Bee" (59) in a nearby
bean-flower reassure the poet that "Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure" (61). However vacant and isolated their surroundings,
she keeps her innocent votaries awake to "Love and Beauty" (63-64), the last three words of the jailed Albert's soliloquy from
But why should the poet raise the question of desertion at all, as he does by his choice of carceral metaphor at the outset, unless
to indicate that he does not, in fact, feel "wise and pure" enough to deserve Nature's fidelity? To "contemplate/ With lively joy
the joys we
In short, one cannot truly share joy with another unless one brings joy of one's own to share. Since this "Joy [. . .] ne'er was given, / Save to the pure, and in their purest hour"—presumably to people like the "virtuous Lady" (63-64) to whom "Dejection" is addressed—we may plausibly take the speaker's intractable mood of dejection in that poem to be symptomatic of his sense of impurity or guilt. In the biographical context of "Dejection," originally a verse epistle addressed to the unresponsive object of Coleridge's adulterous affections, Sara Hutchinson, it is not hard to guess the sexual basis of such feelings: "For not to think of what I needs must feel," the poet tells her, "But to be still and patient, all I can;/ And haply by abstruse research to steal / From my own nature all the natural man— / This was my sole resource" (87-91). Such denial of "the natural man" leads not to joy, however, but to spiritual and imaginative "Life-in-Death," the desolation of the soul experienced by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (193). As we shall see, what is denied in "This Lime-Tree Bower," or as Kirkham puts it, evaded, is the poet's own "angry spirit," as he expressed it in Albert's dungeon soliloquy. Resurrected by Mary Lamb's act of matricide and invigorated by a temptation to literary fratricide that the poet was soon to act upon, it apparently deserved incarceration.
Wordsworth was not only, in Coleridge's eyes, a great man and poet, a "Giant" in every respect, but he was also an imperturbable and taciturn rock of stability compared to the two men of letters he was soon to replace as Coleridge's poetic confreres. Lloyd was often manic and intermittantly insane, while Lamb, as we shall see, was not entirely immune to outright lunacy himself. Nor should we forget, despite Lamb's being designated the recipient of God's healing grace in "This Lime-Tree Bower," evidence linking Coleridge's characterization of the poem's scene of writing as a "prison" with the reckless agent of the "strange calamity" that had befallen his "gentle-hearted" friend. For the two days following Mrs. Lamb's murder, Mary Lamb faced the prospect of actual imprisonment at Newgate before the court agreed to let Charles commit her to Fisher House.
As it happens, Coleridge had made an almost identical attempt on the life of a family member when he was a boy. He describes the
incident in the fourth of five autobiographical letters he sent to his friend Thomas Poole between February 1797 and February
1798, a period roughly coinciding with the composition of I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese
The entire neighborhood searched until dawn for the young fugitive, who had fallen asleep on the bank of a nearby stream while
consoling himself with thoughts of his mother's anguish at his disappearance.
Several details of Coleridge's account of his fit of rage coincide with what we know of Mary Lamb's fit of homicidal lunacy. In
both cases, the weapon was a knife, the initial object of violence was a sibling or sibling-like figure, the cause of violence
involved a meal, and the mother intervened. According to an account of Mary Lamb’s crime in the It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized
a case knife laying [sic] on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room; on the
eager calls of her helpless infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her
parent.
The child [the apprentice], by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late—the dreadful
scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with
the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a
severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room. (Quoted in Courtney, 115)
At
this point Charles Lamb entered the dining room and, beholding Mary standing in front of his dying mother, snatched the knife out
of her hand.
As Edward Dowden (313) and H. M. Belden (passim) noted many years ago, the "roaring dell" of "This Lime-Tree Bower" has several
analogues, real and imagined, in other work by Coleridge from this period, including the demonically haunted "romantic chasm" of
"Kubla Khan," which could have been drafted as early as September 1797.
"Melancholy," probably written in July or August of 1797, just after Charles Lamb's visit, is a brief, emblematic personification
in eighteenth-century mode that draws on some of the same Quantock imagery that informs the dell of Coleridge's conversation poem.
Melancholy is pictured as having "mus'd herself to sleep":
In "This Lime-Tree Bower," the "dark green file of long lank Weeds," the Adder's Tongue, similarly bows in the
"roaring dell"—"[s]till nod[s]"—in breezes of aquatic origin, "[f]ann'd by the water-fall!" (16-19). The long-standing
professional as well as popular associations of melancholy with madness had been realized in stone above the entrance to Bedlam
well before Coleridge wrote these lines.
The "imperfect sounds" of Melancholy's "troubled thought" seem to achieve clearer articulation at the beginning of the fourth act
of
The scene is a dark cavern showing gleams of moonlight at its further end, and Ferdinand's first words resonate eerily with one of
the most vivid features of the "roaring dell" in "This Lime-Tree Bower": "Drip! drip! drip! drip!—in such a place as this /
It has nothing else to do but, drip! drip! drip!" (4.1.1-2). Upon exploring the cavern, he is overcome by what the stage
directions call "
After Osorio murders Ferdinand, the victim's body is discovered in the cavern by his wife, Alhadra. In the horror of her discovery,
she later tells her friends, "all the hanging Drops of the wet roof, / Turn'd into blood—I saw them turn to blood!" (4.3.
89-90), lines that reinforce imagistic associations between "This Lime-Tree Bower"'s "fantastic" dripping weeds and the dripping
blood of a murder victim. Before she and her Moresco band appear at the end of the play to drag Osorio away for punishment, he
tries to kill his older brother, Albert, by stabbing him with his sword. As in young Sam's attempt to murder Frank, a female
intervenes to prevent the crime—not Osorio's mother, but his brother's betrothed, Maria. Osorio's last words after
confessing to the murder of Ferdinand, however, are addressed to an older, maternal figure, Alhadra herself: "O woman! / I have
stood silent like a Slave before thee, / That I might taste the Wormwood and the Gall, / And satiate this self-accusing Spirit, /
With bitterer agonies, than death can give" (5.2.196-200). After pleading for Osorio's life on behalf of Maria, Alhadra bends to
the will of her fellow Morescos and commands that Osorio be taken away to be executed. Significantly, by the time the revised play
premiered at Drury Lane many years later, on 23 January 1813, Coleridge had retitled it
Coleridge's acute awareness of his own enfeebled will and mental instability in the face of life's challenges seems to have
rendered him unusually sympathetic to the mental distresses of others, including, presumably, incarcerated criminals like the
impulsive Reverend William Dodd. "Poor
Coleridge's reaction on first learning of Mary Lamb's congenital illness, a year and a half before she took her mother's life, is consistent with other evidence of his spontaneous empathy with victims of madness. In a letter to Southey of 29 December 1794, written when he was in London renewing his school-boy acquaintance with Charles, Coleridge feelingly described Mary's most recent bout of insanity: "His Sister has lately been very unwell—confined to her Bed dangerously—She is all his Comfort—he her's. They dote on each other. Her mind is elegantly stored—her heart feeling—Her illness preyed a good deal on his [Lamb's] Spirits" (Griggs 1.147). Coleridge also enclosed some "careless Lines" that he had addressed "To C. Lamb" by way of comforting him.
In this brief poem, entitled "To a Friend, Together with an Unfinished Poem," Coleridge states how his relationship to his own next
oldest sister, Anne, the "sister more beloved" and "play-mate when we both were clothed alike" of "Frost at Midnight" (42-43),
helps him to understand Lamb's feelings. Anne, the only daughter to survive infancy in a family of nine brothers, had died in
March 1791 at the age of 21. "In Fancy, well I know," Coleridge tells Charles,
Coleridge expresses more sanguine expectations for Charles and his sister: "For not uninterested the dear Maid /
I've view'd, her Soul affectionate yet wise, / Her polish'd Wit as mild as lambent Glories / That play around an holy Infant's
head" (22-25). In a letter to Bejamin Flowers written three months after the Lambs' "strange calamity," he refers to Mary as "the
Sister of my dearest Friend, and herself dear to me as an only Sister. She is recovered, and is acquainted with what she has done,
and is very calm" (Griggs 1.267).
Coleridge's sympathy with Mary may have been enhanced by awareness of her vexed relationship with the mother she killed, who, even
Charles had to admit, had been unsympathetic to Mary's illness and largely unappreciative of the degree of sacrifice she had made
to support and care for her parents. "Poor Mary," he wrote Coleridge on 24 October, just a month after the tragedy, "my mother
indeed
She loved her, as she loved us all with aMother's love, but in opinion, in feeling, & sentiment, & disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her right. Never could believe how muchshe loved her—but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection, too frequently with coldness &repulse.(Marrs 1.52; boldface represents enlarged script)
Lamb's enlarged lettering of "Mother's love" and "repulse" seems to convey an ironically inverted tone of voice, as if to suggest
that the popular myth of maternal affection was, in Mrs. Lamb's case, not only void of real content, but inversely cruel and
insensitive in fact. Despite her youngest son's self-avowed status as his "mother's darling" (Griggs 1.347), Mrs. Coleridge seems
to have been similarly undemonstrative, if not frigid, in her affections toward him, and was often exasperated, in turn, by young
Sam's dreamy, arrogant aloofness.
Given Frank's ambivalent role in Samuel's early life as both sibling rival and fraternal playmate, as tyrannical bully and tender nurse, it is no stretch of the imagination to assume that, in retrospect, as he described the scene of his attempted fratricide to Poole, Coleridge might have wondered whether or not the paring knife he had aimed at Frank's chest could have been more justifiably lodged in the ungenerous breast of his mother, whose withholding of affection was the principal cause of the intermittent but acrimonious rivalry between him and the brother he nonetheless loved and admired. That only one letter to his mother, formal and distant in tone, survived from his days at Christ's Hospital; that he barely maintained contact with her after his own marriage; and that he did not even bother to attend her funeral in 1809, all suggest that being his "mother's darling" (Griggs 1.347), while it may have spoiled young Sam, was never received as an expression of love. Such a possibilty might explain the sullen satisfaction the boy had derived from thoughts of his mother's anxiety over his disappearance after attempting to stab Frank that fateful afternoon.
Among others suffering from mental instability whom Coleridge counted as close friends there was Charles Lamb himself. In his
earliest surviving letter to Coleridge, dated 27 May 1796, Lamb reports, with characteristic jocosity, that his "life has been
somewhat diversified of late": The 6 weeks that finished last year & began this your very humble servant spent very
agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton—. I am got somewhat rational now, & dont bite any one. But mad I was—&
many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told. (Marrs, 1. 3-4)
Lamb offers
Coleridge, as a token of his affection, the fact that his "head ran on you in my madness," and appends a sonnet "written in my
prison house in one of my lucid Intervals," addressed "to my sister." In it, he apologizes to Mary for his "angry" and "[p]eevish"
behavior while under the influence of a "sickly mind" (Marrs 1.4). Providing as it does the basic scheme for the scene of writing
invoked in "This Lime-Tree Bower"—forced confinement, apostrophe to an absent addressee, thoughts of a dear friend at
liberty—this letter, and the poem it contains, was written after Lamb had, presumably, received Coleridge's verses on Mary's
madness in December 1794, and nine months before Mary's attack on her mother.
Insanity apparently agreed with Lamb.: "[A]t some future time I will amuse you with an account as full as my memory will permit of
the strange turn my phrensy took," he writes Coleridge on 9 June 1796. I look back on it at times with a gloomy kind of
Envy. For while it lasted I had many many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur
& wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid; comparatively so. (Marrs 1. 19)
His own
ambivalent relationship to altered states of mind and reduced self-control may have predisposed Coleridge to appreciate the
double-edged attraction to derangement conveyed by Lamb's description.
It is unlikely that their mutual friend, young Charles Lloyd, would have shared that appreciation. His father's offer to finance
his eldest son's education as a live-in pupil of Coleridge's in September 1796 followed Charles's having shown himself mentally
incapable of remaining at school. Coleridge saw much of himself in the younger Charles: "Your son and I are happy in our
connection," he wrote Lloyd, Sr., on 15 October 1796, "our opinions and feelings are as nearly alike as we can expect" (Griggs
1.240). Lamb, too, soon became close friends with Lloyd, and several poems by him were even included, along with Lloyd's, in
Coleridge's
and his distemper (which may with equal propriety be named either Somnambulism, or frightful Reverie,or Epilepsy from accumulated feelings ) is alarming. He falls all at once into a kind of Night-mair: and all the Realities round him mingle with, and form a part of, the strange Dream. All his voluntary powers are suspended; but he perceives every thing & hears every thing, and whatever he perceives & hears he perverts into the substance of his delirious Vision. (Griggs 1.257)
By early December, Coleridge was writing Lloyd's father to say he could no longer undertake to educate Charles, although the young
man's "vehement" feelings when told he would have to leave had persuaded his mentor to agree to continue their present living
arrangements (Griggs 1.263-64). Eventually Lloyd's nocturnal "fits," each consuming several hours in "a
It is not a little unnerving to picture the menage that would have ended up sharing the tiny cotttage in Nether Stowey that month
had Lloyd continued to live there. Sarah and baby Hartley and the maid; William Wordsworth, Coleridge's new brother in poetry,
emerging from a prolonged despondency and accompanied by his high-strung sister, Dorothy; Lloyd keeping the household awake all
night with his hallucinatory ravings; Coleridge pushed to the edge of distraction by lack of sleep; and Charles Lamb, former
inmate of a Hoxton insane asylum, in search of repose and relaxation. Had she not killed her mother the previous September, mad
Mary Lamb would probably have been there too. Coleridge's repeated invitations to join him in the West Country had been extended
to her as well as to her brother as early as June 1796 (Lamb,
Of course, when Coleridge had invited Lamb to come to Nether Stowey to restore his spiritual and mental health the previous
September, Lloyd had not yet joined him in residence, and Wordsworth was only a distant acquaintance, not the bright promise of
the future that he was to become by June of the next year. If we consider the poet's dispatching of his visitors, old and
new—William and Dorothy, along with Charles Lamb and, in the Southey draft of "This Lime-Tree Bower," Sarah as well—in
a perambulation across the Quantock Hills as an attempt to ripen their still green intimacy through shared experiences of beauty
and sublimity, then certain features of the poem's composition history become more intelligible: for instance, that Coleridge
almost immediately sent copies of the poem to Southey and Lloyd—the two "brother" poets (one literally his brother-in-law)
who were unable to join the group in person. While "gentle-hearted Charles" is mentioned in the first dozen lines of both
epistolary versions, he is not imagined to be the exclusive auditor and spectator of the last rook winging homeward across the
setting sun at the end. In Southey's copy "My Sister, & my friends" and in Lloyd's "[m]y Sara & my Friends" are stationed
and apostrophized together. Also indicative of Coleridge's more pragmatic intentions is the fact that he withheld the poem's
publication for the three ensuing years during which the little group had disintegrated, and that the poem's eventual subtitle,
with its shouting capitals, "Addressed to CHARLES LAMB, of the India-House, London," as well as the revised lines refocusing our
attention on Lamb as the exclusive observer of the rook at the end of the poem, did not appear until its first publication, that
is, only after Coleridge's falling-out with Lamb had been repaired. (Presumably, Lamb received a copy before his departure from
Nether Stowey for London on 14 July 1797, or Coleridge read it to him, along with the rest of the company, after they had all
returned from their walk.) Coleridge's initial choices for epistolary dissemination points to something of a commemorative or
celebratory motive, as if the poet wished to incite all of its original auditors
In this light, Sarah's accidental scalding of her husband's foot seems, in retrospect, premonitory. Despite Coleridge's hopes, his new wife never looked upon the Wordsworths, brother or sister, in any other than a competitive light. Their values, their tastes, their very style of living, as well as their own circle of friends were, in her eyes, an incomprehensible and irritating distraction from, if not a serious impediment to, the distingished future that her worldlier ambitions had envisioned for her gifted spouse in the academy, the press, and politics. To the Wordsworths she was a philistine, both intellectually and artistically, whose quotidian domestic and worldly anxieties placed a burden on their friend's creative faculties that they worked mightily to relieve by monopolizing him as much as possible in the years to come, while making Sarah feel distinctly unwelcome.
Lamb's response to Coleridge's hospitality upon returning to London gave more promising signs of future comradery. He immediately
wrote back to express his gratitude and to ask for a copy of Wordsworth's "inscription" (Marrs 1. 119), probably "Lines left upon
the seat of a yew tree" (Marrs 1. 118n1). His warm feelings were not free of self-doubt, characteristically: "I could not talk
much, while I was with you, but my silence was not sullenness, nor I hope from any bad motive; but, in truth, disuse has made me
awkward at it. I know I behaved myself [. . . ] most like a sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me" (Marrs 1.
117-118). What Wordsworth thought of the encounter we do not know, but the juxtaposition of the sulky Lamb, ordinarily overflowing
with facetious charm, and the Wordsworths, especially the vivacious Dorothy, must have presented a striking contrast. Whatever
Lamb's initial reaction upon reading "This Lime-Tree Bower" or hearing it recited to him, the bitterness and hurt that was to
overtake him after the publication of the Higginbottom parodies and Coleridge's falling out with Lloyd found oblique expression
three years later in an ironic outburst when he re-read the poem in Southey's 1800 For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me
gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral
coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; [. . .] I can scarce think that you could think to
gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer. (Marrs 1.217-18)
A "green-sick
sonneteer" is precisely what Coleridge had made Lamb out to be in the Higgentbottem parodies. Little more than a week after
posting this letter, Lamb was to call "This Lime-Tree Bower" "your Satire upon me in the Anthology," and despite his beginning "to
spy out something like beauty & design in it," he again asked Coleridge "please to blot out
Regarding Robert Southey's and Charles Lloyd's initial reactions to receiving handwritten copies of "This Lime-Tree Bower," we have
no information. It is most likely that Coleridge wished to salvage the two relationships, which had come under a considerable
strain in the preceding months, and incorporate these brother poets into what he was just beginning to hope might be a revolution
in letters. His neglect of Lloyd in the following weeks—something Lamb strongly advises him to correct in a letter of 20
September—suggests that whatever hopes he may have entertained of amalgamating old friends with new were fast diminishing in
the candid glare of Wordsworth's far superior genius and the fitful flickering of an incipient alliance based on shared grudges
that was quickly forming between Southey and Lloyd.
In two more months, both Lamb and Lloyd, along with Southey, were to find themselves on the receiving end of a poetic tribute radically different from the fervent beatitudes of "This Lime-Tree Bower." Before considering Coleridge's Higginbottom satires in more detail, however, we would do well to trace our route thence by returning to Dodd's prison thoughts.
Intrafamilial murder, revenge, confinement, madness, nightmare, shame, and remorse all lie at the origins of "This Lime-Tree
Bower," informing "the still roaring dell, of which" Coleridge "told" his friends on that July day in 1797, and seeking relief in
the vicarious salvation he experienced as he envisioned them emerging into the luminous "presence" of an "Almighty Spirit" whose
eternal Word—uttered even in the dissonant creaking of a rook's wing—"tells of Life." The poem, in short, represents
the moral and emotional pilgrimage of a soul newly burdened by thoughts of poetic fratricide and wishfully imagining a way to
achieve salvation, along with his brother poets, old and new. The primary allegorical emblems of that pilgrimage—the dell
and the hilltop—appear as well in part four of William Dodd's
Remanded to his cell after a harrowing appearance in court, Dodd falls asleep and dreams an allegory of his past life prominently featuring a "lowly vale" of "living green" (4.549-50) with a "pure crystal" stream (4.557), and next, a "mountain's top" (4.569). The vale represents Dodd's humble beginnings as a village minister in West Ham, "whose Habitants, / When sorrow-sunk, my voice of comfort soothe’d [. . .] ministring to all their wants": "Dear was the Office, cheering was the Toil," he writes, "And something like angelic felt my Soul!" (4.559-62; 564-69). But he is soon lured away by a crowned, crimson-robed tempter up to "a neighboring mountain's top / Where blaz'd Preferment's Temple" (4.569-70), representing his later, elevated station as king's chaplain and prominent London tutor and preacher—fruits of ambition and goads to the worldliness and debt that led to his crime. The view from the mountain is dreary and its path lined with sneering crowds. Turning to his guide, Dodd begs to be restored to the vale, whereupon he is hurled down to a "dungeon dark" (4.585), his present scene of writing.
Both spiritually and psychologically, Coleridge's "roaring dell" and hilltop reverse the moral vectors of Dodd's topographical
allegory: Dodd's scenery represents a transition from piety to remorse, Coleridge's from remorse to natural piety. Yet both follow
a trajectory of ascent, and both rely on vividly imagined landscape details pressed into the service of a symbolic narrative of
personal salvation, which Dodd resumes after his temporary setback in a descriptive mode that resembles the suffusion of sunlight
that inspires Coleridge’s benevolence upon his return of attention to the lime-tree bower at line 45:
This armored visitor, Dodd tells us helpfully in a footnote, is "Faith."
Fortified by the sight of the "crimson Cross" (4.597) displayed on Faith's shield, Dodd is next led forth from his "den" by Repentance "meek approaching" (4.606) (likened to Le Brun's portrait of Madame de la Valiere) and guided though "perils infinite, and terrors wild" to a "gate of glittering gold" (4.609, 611) A "homely Porter" (4.613), Humility, opens the gate to reveal a vision of “Love” (Christ), "[h]igh on a sapphire Throne" and "[b]eaming forth living rays of Light and Joy" (4.617-619). "Dissolv’d," with all his "senses rapt / In vision beatific," Dodd is next carried to a "bank / Of purple Amaranthus" (4.627-29) by an angel embodying "th' ennobling Power [. . .] destin'd in the human heart / To nourish Friendship's flame!" (4.633-35). Eagerly he asks the angel, "[I]n these delightful Realms/ Of happiness supernal, shall we know,— / Say, shall we meet and know those dearest Friends / Those tender Relatives, to whose concerns / You minister appointed?" (4.639-43). He is rudely awakened, however, before receiving an answer. These are, as Coleridge would later put it, friends whom the author "never more may meet again."
As I have indicated, Dodd's
Another factor in the longevity of
These formal correspondences between the microcosm of personal conversion and salvation and the macrocosm of God's Creation were rooted, via Calvinism, in the great progenitor of the Western confessional tradition, Augustine of Hippo. The landscape allegory of "This Lime-Tree Bower," like Dodd's and Bunyan's, represents a transposition into personal terms of the Christian narrative of salvation as pilgrimage, and like that of Coleridge's predecessors, including Augustine, it is offered as an exemplary itinerary, one that the confessor has pursued and of which he is telling others, or "of which [he has] told" them, for the purpose of releasing them—in Coleridge's case, his "gentle-hearted" friend in particular—from a similar bondage of the soul.
However, as noted above, whereas Augustine, Bunyan, and Dodd (at least, by the end of
Students of Coleridge's poetry will recognize in the speaker's implied inability to end his state of spiritual isolation the
relentless return of the Ancient Mariner's "woful agony" (579) following the epiphanic release achieved by his unconscious
benediction of the glistening, "happy" sea-snakes in
That remorse clearly extends to the consequences of his act on his brother mariners:
At the heart of Coleridge's famous poem lies a crime, not against God's creatures, but against his brother mariners, which his initial inability to take joy in God's creatures simply registers. This might be summarized, again, as the crime of bringing no joy to share and, thus, finding no joy either in his brothers or in God's creation. It is not far-fetched to see in the albatross, as Robert Penn Warren suggested long ago, more than an icon of the Christian soul: to see it as representing the third person of the Trinity, God's Holy Spirit, which, according to the Acts of the Apostles and early patristic teaching, had first manifested itself among humankind, after Christ's death, in the shared love and joy of the congregated followers he left behind, his holy Church. Can it be a mere conincidence that, like Frank playing dead and springing back to life, the mariners should drop dead as a result of the mariner's shooting of the albatross, only to be resurrected like surly zombies in order to sail the ship and, at last, give way to a "seraph-band" (496), each waving his flaming arm aloft like one of the tongues of flame alighting on the heads of the apostles at Pentacost?
Much of Coleridge's adult life—his enthusiastic participation in the Pantisocracy scheme with Southey, whom he considered (resorting to nautical terminology) the "Sheet Anchor" of his own virtues (Griggs 1.173); the vigorous renewal of his friendship with Lamb in December 1794 and January 1795, while all but hiding out in London from Southey and Sarah Fricker; his desperate need, after marriage, to remain in close proximity to Poole in Nether Stowey; his ludicrously impracticable boarding arrangements with Lloyd; his sudden uprooting of his family from Devonshire in 1799 and settling in the north to be near his new friend and brother poet, Wordsworth —all these events can be understood as repeated attempts to gather about him a band of brothers that would redeem not only the future of poetry, but also the fraternal strifes of Coleridge's childhood, and remove that "curse in a dead man's eye" (260) first observed in the countenance of the possum-playing Frank and later haunting the imagination of the Ancient Mariner: a "look" that "[h]ad never passed away" (255-56).
Young Sam had tried to murder his brother on no discernable
It is particularly difficult to interpret Coleridge's behavior in the "Nehemiah Higginbottom" affair as anything other than an
enthusiastically demonstrative sacrifice of his friendship with Lamb and Lloyd, and perhaps Southey as well, on the altar of his
new idol, William Wordsworth, and the new poetry he stood for. In 1795, as Coleridge had begun to drift and then urgently paddle
away from Southey after the good ship Pantisocracy went down (he did not even invite Southey to his wedding on 4 October), he had
turned to Lamb (soon to be paired with Lloyd) for personal and artistic support. Lamb's letters to him from May 1796 up to the
writing of "This Lime-Tree Bower" are full of advice and suggestions, welcomed and often solicited by Coleridge and based on
careful close reading, for improving his verse and prose style. Was it something Wordsworth had said during Lamb's July visit,
perhaps to or about Lamb himself, that caused Coleridge, the following November, to send the
As it happened, Coleridge managed to alienate three brother poets with one mocking blow. Southey, who had been trying to repair
relations with his brother-in-law the previous year, assumed himself to be the target of the second of the mock sonnets, "To
Simplicity" (Griggs 1.358-9). Despite Coleridge's disavowal (he said he was targeting himself), Southey revenged himself in a
scathing review of
Richard Holmes considers the offence given by the Higginbottom parodies to have been "wholly unexpected" by Coleridge (1.174), but
it is difficult to read the poet's inclusion of his own explicitly repudiated style of versification—if it was indeed
intended as a sample of his own writing—as anything but a disingenuous attempt to appear ingenuous in his offer of helpful,
if painful, criticism to "
At the end of
Dodd has led us to this point of valediction through a circuitous tour of prison routines and convict behavior;
autobiography and reminiscence; polemical adjurations to prison reformers and legislators, as well as his fellow clerics,
prisoners, and citizens; and visionary evocations of landscapes terrestrial and heavenly. My own route to the end of placing
Dodd's
The importance of friendship to Coleridge's creative and intellectual development is apparent to even the most casual reader of his
poetry. Gurion Taussig and Adam Sisman made it the guiding theme of their recent book-length studies, Taussig's