In Samuel Coleridge's “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the speaker sees the lime bower under which it sits like a prison, despite its beautiful description. He longs to venture out with his friends and see the beauty of nature that they will see, and because he desperately wants to be elsewhere, he misses the beauty right in front of him and interprets the lime tree arbor as a prison. The speaker's imagination transforms something beautiful, the lime tree arbor, into something dark and suffocating. His mind transforms the nature around him and his negative thoughts trap him in a prison he creates for himself. In Wordsworth's poem, “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room,” the speaker also explores the symbol of a prison with respect to the daily responsibilities in one's role and the structure that those routines imprint on one's life. The speaker of this poem warns against letting one's mind have too much freedom and encourages finding comfort in structure. Examining the speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” with the wisdom of the speaker in “Nuns Fret Not” reveals where the former goes wrong in his reading of the lime-tree bower. This essay will argue that the symbol of the lime arbor and the prison in both works reveals the ability of one's imagination to transform one's surroundings for better or worse. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayIn "This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison," the speaker allows the setting of a beautiful lime tree bower to be distorted by his negative thoughts. He laments that "here [he] must remain" while his friends go for a walk which he cannot join because he is injured, and laments that he has "lost / Beauties and feelings, as they would have been / Very sweet to me too I remember when age / had darkened my eyes to blindness” (Coleridge 2-5) This lime tree bower is usually very beautiful to him, but the pain he feels because he cannot go with his friends overwhelms him. reality and the speaker's mind turns the environment into a prison. The speaker of “Nuns Fret Not” warns against allowing the imagination to take over because of its ability to transform one's subjective reality into a place. dark. Sympathizes with those “who have felt the burden of too much freedom” because they are distressed by a mind that is too free (Wordsworth 13). The speaker of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” is experiencing this state of anguish and allows the his imagination to run free and take over, turning his lime tree arbor into a prison. Both speakers conclude that the prisons they describe in their poems are not prisons at all, revealing the power of the mind to create a dark environment or to see things positively based on one's perspective. As the speaker in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” recounts all the things he will miss on his friends' walk, he thinks, “very happy,/ [of his] good heart Charles! for [Charles] you have pined / And longed for Nature, for many years, / In the great secluded City” (Coleridge 27-30). In the following verse, “A delight/ Comes suddenly into [his] heart, and [he is] happy/ As [he] [himself] were there!” (44-46). Realizing that his friend Charles rarely gets to experience nature due to his location in the city and probably always longs for it, the speaker opens his eyes to reality and sees the beauty of the lime tree arbor and the nature he is currently in . . The lime tree arbor is not a prison at all and its misinterpretation of the.