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Essay / The themes of romanticism in “This lime tree shelters my prison!” »
« This lime tree shelters my prison! I lost/beauties and feelings” (441). Coleridge initially insisted on his absence from the hike but his imagination allowed him to follow his friends on their hike even though he was not on the adventure. Towards the end of the poem, Coleridge remarked that nature is everywhere, meaning that beauty is not always as extravagant as it seems. Despite his injury, Coleridge's attention is drawn to his cottage, in which he sits, after noticing that there is access to the beauty of nature everywhere. Coleridge's writings allow for opposites in his work as he allows his audience to better understand his incident and what he learned from missing the hike with his friends. It shows that one day of lacking view of nature does not correspond to the many days that ordinary people take nature and its offerings for granted. The opposite of this poem is imagination and reality, because the things that can be imagined can end up being reality if people have a true appreciation of nature, as the romantics did. Opposites in poems do not work differently for each writer, as the Romantic period was a time when people wrote lyrics and often added oppositions in their works to help ordinary people better understand their nature.