He then goes on to describe how much he would have liked to go with them.

‘I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! He is saying that even when he is old and blind he would still have had those memories of beauty had he been able to go with his friends. He goes on to describe in more detail what he thinks they are seeing. The imagery in these lines can inspire amazing visions of natural beauty. ‘On springy heath, along the hilltop edge…

To that still roaring dell of which I told; The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,And only speckled by the midday sun;’ He describes the dell, roaring presumably because of the wind roaring through the trees, and only speckled by the little sun shining through the branches. From describing the dell he moves in closer onto the tree; ‘Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge – that branchless ash, Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne’er tremble in the gale, but tremble still, Fanned by the waterfall! ‘ The fallen ash tree stretching across the dell like a bridge, the leaves don’t shake because of the wind, but are blown by the waterfall.Once again Coleridge mentions his friends and they beauty of they sight they are seeing; ‘And there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight! ) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone. ‘ He states how beautiful the sight of the wild plants growing over the edge of the blue rocks is. , he uses colour imagery, dark green and blue.

He describes the view his friends will see as they emerge from the woody dell; ‘Now my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide heaven – and view again The many-steepled tract magnificentOf hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,’ Coleridge goes onto name his friend Charles Lamb and says that he should be the most glad at these beautiful sights of nature, having been in the city so long. ‘In gladness all – but thou methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! For thou hast pined And hungered after nature many a year In the great city pent, winning thy way. ‘ Coleridge takes his time and uses every inch of beautiful imagery he can muster up to describe this sunset, he is obviously imagining the most beautiful sunset he has ever seen and is putting down into words how beautiful it really is.’Ah, slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath flowers! Richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue ocean! ‘ Coleridge now notices that there is beauty all around him in his little lime-tree bower, he has not missed out on beauty at all, he has not seen the same things as his friends but he has seen just as much beauty as they have and he has experienced the same sunset as them.’This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked Much that has soothed me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! Coleridge realises the nature is everywhere and just because he didn’t join his friends on their walk he was still surrounded by nature. Just because he cannot share his joy at the beauty around him and he could not share Charles’s joy does not make the joy any less.

In conclusion Coleridge uses natural imagery to great affect in these poems some more than others, Coleridge has used natural imagery to give a sense of beauty as in ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ or a sense of evil as in ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. Bibliography Romanticism; An Anthology: Duncan Wu, (2005) Blackwell Publishing, Australia A Companion to Romanticism: Various authors, Duncan Wu (2006) Blackwell Publishing, Australia Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature: Drabble and Stringer (2003) Oxford University Press, Oxford.