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Welcome to the class blog for ENGL 206-012. Here we interpret 400 years of literature with our 21st century minds and tools. Enjoy!

Sunday, September 29, 2013

That Lime-Tree Bower is His Time Capsule

Woah!  Based on its title, I thought this piece would blow my mind, and it did, but not only in the way that I expected.  For starters, "bower", defined by Oxford as "a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood," has a positive connotation.  But immediately, the speaker shows this is not the case.

In the first two lines of the poem, the speaker shows us why the lime-tree bower is a prison, "Well, they are gone, and here must I remain/This lime-tree bower my prison!" (1-2). So, the speaker is unhappy because his friends left him...understandable.  I suppose I understand why he relates a beautiful lime-tree bower to a prison.

But wait, the rest of the poem is more mind-blowing, as the speaker takes us on a journey through his mind—a journey not bound by time or space.  "Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/Most sweet to my remembrance even when age/Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness!" (3-5).  Here, the speaker has left his current situation and is fantasizing about what could have been--and not only that, but how he would have remembered what could’ve been, even when he was dead!  Crazy.  He's thinking about remembering something that hasn't even, and won't even, happen.


But wait, there's more.  He goes on to think about what his friends are likely doing in the current moment.  He imagines them, "wandering in gladness" (8), in a dell somewhere.  He is especially interested in thinking about all the fun his friend Charles, who was "in the great City pent" (31), (more prison-like, or maybe even biblical, references?) and had been longing to get in touch with Nature.  Sooo, the speaker thinks of the future, the past, what might have been, and what might be for someone else, without much regard for where he currently is.  Mind blown.  That lime-tree bower is his time capsule.

2 comments:

  1. **no "all the fun" before "his friend Charles," in the fourth sentence of the last paragraph haha.

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  2. I found this poem to be “mind blowing” as well, for it really did take the reader on a journey. First we find the reader in the garden of lime-trees. Next we are taken through his imagination as he daydreams that he is in the sights in the shoes of his visiting friends. The reader is then taken back to the original scene, as the speaker as able to feel happy as if he were seeing all the nature and its wonders that he describes. The lime-trees that were once like a prison now don’t seem as bad.

    I really like the lines 58-63, because it is here that the speaker opens his eyes to the beauty that is around him. it is here he realizes that people who have an appreciation for nature can find beauty everywhere. For example, when says “No plot so narrow, be put Nature there/No waste so vacant but may we employ/Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart” he is saying that even a space that is small and empty or wasted looking can become something beautiful if we open our senses (like sight and sound and smell). I think this is an important lesson to take away in that it reflects the idea of not judging a book by its cover. We must not become close-minded to first appearances but must consider that beauty that may be there.

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