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  • The Rhetorical Occasion of 'This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison'
  • William A. Ulmer

Most readings of 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' present it as a self-consolatory exercise in which Coleridge's sympathetic imagination delivers him from an imprisoning solitude. Here I will argue alternately, first, that Charles Lamb rather than Coleridge himself is the principal subject of the text's consolatory enterprise, and second that the consolations offered are in important respects less imaginative than theological – more specifically, that they are implicitly but crucially Unitarian. Reeve Parker has anticipated my argument by casting 'Lime-Tree Bower' as 'a consolation based in essentially Christian tradition'1 and offered to Lamb with an eye to Mary Lamb's murder of their mother, the 'strange calamity'2 which Coleridge mentions Lamb struggling to overcome. Parker draws his interpretive model not from Coleridge's Unitarianism, however, but from 'the Christian meditative tradition that Coleridge encountered in extensive reading of seventeenth-century Puritan and Anglican writers' (Parker, 27). Conceding Coleridge's Unitarianism, Paul Magnuson brilliantly reads the blessing to Lamb in 'Lime-Tree Bower' as 'not only a private gesture, but also a public stance, a Unitarian and dissenting stance against an established order that has corrupted Christianity'.3 But Magnuson is concerned with Unitarianism primarily for its contribution to the text's carefully hedged political self-presentation. And he also writes that 'the poem traces Coleridge's emergence from a private bower and prison … throughthe agency of the Wordsworths and Lamb' (Magnuson, 62), a claim which again emphasizes Lamb redeeming Coleridge rather than the other way around. Although the Wordsworths participated in the walk recounted in 'Lime-Tree Bower', it remains Lamb, we should recall, to whom the poem is inscribed. We should notice similarly that Coleridge turns to his own situation after he finishes depicting Lamb's joyous vision of 'the Almighty Spirit' (line 43), so that his own reconciliation merely unfolds a lesson established by his reflections on Lamb. 'Lime-Tree Bower' certainly dramatizes Coleridge himself achieving redemptive understanding. But the text's consolatory project centers on Lamb, I believe, and takes its bearings from Lamb's religious attitudes. That is why the Unitarianism that Coleridge shared with Lamb, but about which they also disagreed, helped set the terms of Coleridge's address to his suffering friend.

1.

The friendship of Coleridge and Lamb beganat Christ's Hospital, of course, but grew into intellectual intimacy at the Salutation andCat, the smoky London public house they frequented together in the winter of 1794–1795. There they talked into the night [End Page 15] about poetry and politics, but about religion too, and Unitarianism in particular. As a child Lamb had accompanied his Aunt Hetty to Unitarian meeting-houses. Yet it is Coleridge who appears to have effected his conversion, Lamb's January 1798 remark to Coleridge,'to you I owe much, under God – in my brief acquaintance with you in London your conversations won me to the better cause', seemingly referring to an outright adoption of Unitarianism.4 In any case, under the spell of Coleridge's advocacy, 'Priestley became Lamb's idol', Winifred Courtney remarks; 'he read everything of Priestley's he could get hold of'.5 In fact, it was Lamb about whom Coleridgewas writing when he famously referred, in a December 1794 letter to Southey, to 'him who like me is a Unitarian Christian and an Advocate for the Automatism of Man' (CLi. 147). And when Southey, shortly after receiving this letter, arrived in London to takea reluctant Coleridge back to Bristol and Sara Fricker, he initially made his way to the Salutation and Cat on a Sunday only to discover that Coleridge 'was gone with Lambto the Unitarian chapel'.6 Southey soon found Coleridge and ended his Salutation and Cat evenings with Lamb. Yet Southey could notend the ideal of friendship that had become associated for both Lamb and Coleridge, and later for Charles Lloyd as well, with ideas of selfless community dependent on the moral and political speculations of Hartley and Priestley. Citing Coleridge's claim that 'Jesus was the friend of the whole human Race', Gurion Taussig has shown how 'all three men's...

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