Imaginative journeys are as important as any other journey in their potential to teach. Journeys act as a method for self knowledge - helping all to achieve a state of appreciation for one's own potential as a person. Imaginative journeys broaden ones understanding of oneself and the world. All journeys have their limits; in this case it is the imagination. Imagination is the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing, or manipulating mental imagery. Coleridge, through the use of poetry, explores the notion of imaginative journeys in the poem 'Lime Tree bower, my prison’ and how it demonstrates the power of the imagination.
The poem begins with the opening lines that are conversational and abrupt. They immediately establish the reality of the author's confinement by referring to his current position as a "prison” "Well, they are gone and here I must remain, this lime tree bower my prison", creating the sense of being trapped in a dark unsatisfying environment. This is almost suggesting that it is his friends’ fault for leaving him behind rather than his disability. He then follows on with a bitter, bad-tempered tone exaggerating his situation stating he “never more may meet again” his friends. When surely he would see them upon there return but he is just so upset because it’s much more than a nature walk, he is missing out on the chance to appreciate the beauty of nature and perhaps to expand his love for it. Even with his sight- deprived old age, he feels as if he has been denied ‘beauties and feelings” that would have comforted him.
As Coleridge traces his friends’ journey thought nature and describes what he thinks they are experiencing with such precise detail, his love for nature is clear. The reader’s senses are stimulated as he enlists the use of imagery to help us create the scene in our own imaginations. He describes the visual appeal of the ‘roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep and only speckled by the midday sun’ that includes the...