Shadows know: A few lines from Coleridge

“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is one of my favorite Coleridge poems. The poet – a stand-in for Coleridge himself – is sitting in his yard feeling sorry for himself. His friends were out for a walk in Wonderful Glorious Nature while he’s stuck at home with an injured foot. But, he begins following his friends in his imagination and, before you know it, he’s feeling right with the world.

First he follows his friends down into a “roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,” where the foliage is so thick it almost blots out the sun. He imagines an ash stretched across a small stream, and weeds, extending from the bank, and flowing along the surface of the stream. Then we have these lines (20-26):

                     Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven--and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow!

What are those isles of purple shadow?

I don’t really know, but I can infer. We’re looking at the sea, and the sea often does have isles (islands) in it. But these islands are described as being purple and as being shadow. Shadows cast on the surface of the sea could certainly appear to be purple in the appropriate light. But what would be casting those two shadows? Certainly not the ship Coleridge mentions, for it is between the isles.

That leaves one obvious possibility: clouds. The shadows are of clouds. They’re there because they’re between the sun and the surface of the sea in that location.

In thus mentioning those shadows Coleridge implied the existence both of the sun and of the clouds, but mentioned neither one. There’s nothing particularly unusual about such implication. What we say explicitly almost always implies and depends on things left unsaid. In this particular instance Coleridge is preparing us for what happens six lines later, when he explicitly invokes the sun (32-33): “Ah! slowly sink/ Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!”

What, as a psychologist of literary experience, I would like to know is the mechanism by which the mention of those purple isles primes the mind to anticipate the sun, if that’s what it does. But I suspect that “anticipate” is too strong a word. Coleridge’s mention of the shadows activates the schema for “light casts shadows on surface” so that when we actually see the light, that is, are told of the sun, we do so with a sense of recognition and arrival. Ah, that’s where we going.

And now the blue funk is gone. The shadow’s lifted from the poet’s soul. He no longer feels alone.

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I've done an extended and quite detailed analysis of the poem, which is available on the web here.