Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ in 1797. The poem has a curious origin in an incident involving spilt milk; there may be no use crying over spilt milk, but there is something to be said for writing great poetry about it. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My […]
‘Work without Hope’ is a poem by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from 1825. A short poem, ‘Work without Hope’ is sometimes regarded as a sort of coda to Coleridge’s far more famous longer poem, ‘Dejection: An Ode’. A few words of analysis of this short poem about […]
Wordsworth’s great collaborator on the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written in 1798, the same year that Lyrical Ballads appeared, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a night-time meditation on childhood and raising children, offered in a conversational manner and focusing on several key themes of Romantic poetry: the […]
There’s a story behind the poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. During the summer of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife ‘accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole time of C[harles] Lamb’s stay’. As a result, Coleridge was forced to stay behind […]
Coleridge, the co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads, was born in Ottery St Mary in Devon in 1772. The village is named for the river which passes through it – the river which Coleridge eulogises in this Romantic sonnet, ‘To the River Otter’, recalling his childhood when he skimmed stones […]