This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey - Essay Example

Nature has been a source of inspiration to the human race and the way that we handle things clearly related to the kind of natural forces and processes around us. However, the time has shown that man’s greedy need for quick prosperity has made it possible for its destruction. Many plants and animals have been extinct and this makes it necessary that needs protection for the benefit of generations to come.

            In his poem “This Lime-Time Bower My Prison”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempts to discover the environment that was being explored by his friends because he is not able to join them wherever they were. He accomplishes this in his original version of the poem by demonstrating how his friends came to be walking. He then describes Wordsworth’s experience on the walk that brings the idea of the nature of the environment in which his friends were located. Coleridge describes nature by bringing in the aspect of religious imagery in a toned-down form out of deference to Wordsworth’s Unitarianism. The environment has a partial depiction of Coleridge’s own pantheistic feelings. Coleridge’s poem also describes the “Conversation poem” theme of “One Life”, as a unity between the human and those who are divine in nature. The poem links Coleridge’s surroundings under the tree to the Quantocks where Wordsworth was out walking. Coleridge is far from his friends but he connects to his distant friends by their mutual nature and the appreciation of their surroundings. The image of loneliness and solitude is used mostly in the poem throughout in which the narrator is allowed to stay behind as his distant friends, especially Wordsworth, are able to enjoy the walk. The poem further explains that the narrator is able to relax and accept his situation and understand his nature. All these experiences show that the prison condition, as a part of the nature of the narrator, is tolerable since it is physically out of the mental (Lang 234).

            Further, in his poem “Lines Composed of a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth describes his nature of the banks of the River Wye, outlining his general philosophies on nature. The narrator, unlike Coleridge, argues that his age compensates for the loss of thoughtless passion. This involves giving him instead a sense of the sublimity of nature and the poem seems in a sense to grope for God, invoking a “spirit” that “rolls through all things.”  The poem by this narrator depicts partially the environment of Coleridge’s work. It also hacks back in the imagination into a time in which the abbey was not in ruins. The poem, contrary to Wordsworth's work, dwells on both the present and the future.  The poem considers nature and the countryside as an essential part of the narrator’s environment. In the poem of Coleridge, however, the environment is essentially shown as the prison in which the narrator is completely separated from his friends. The poem describes the work of the narrator to have been clearly moved from his head when he had just left Tintern. The work is done in free space away from restriction as is the case with the work of Coleridge in which the job ends mentally as he reaches Bristol (Lang 276).