Final Blog Post

Nick Schenken

Professor Traver

English 277

7 May 2020

Final Blog Post

            If I were to teach one literary work form this semester and only one, I would choose to teach Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”. Due to this texts form, its use of fairly easily understandable vocabular along with its meaning, I feel that this text would be suitable to be taught within an eighth-grade English class.

            I believe that it is important to teach literary works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, because he was an extremely influential human-being within the literary realm and Romantic movement throughout the late 1700’s and the early 1800’s in English society. Not only was he a poet, publishing widely celebrated poems like, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”(1797), “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”(1797-8), and “Frost at Midnight”(1798), but he was also a successful literary critic, philosopher, and theologian.

            I would like to teach, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, to my imaginary class of eighth-graders, because I feel that it informers its readers of a very important message about mental health and the importance of recognizing the beauty of your own situation. The speaker within this poem, whom is likely to be Coleridge himself, begins the poems feeling down about the fact that he is forced to sit underneath this lime-tree due to an ongoing injury feeling left out while his friends go on adventure of sorts throughout the country-side. The poem takes a turn when the speaker realizes that there is plenty of beauty around him where he lies and he reflects on his current situation and begins to appreciate that his situation isn’t so bad after all if he just switches his mindset and start to focuses on the silver-lining of being stuck underneath this lime tree.

            In an era where anxiety and mental illness is on the rise, I think the lessons found with this poem could be extremely helpful for eighth-graders to recognize as they are preparing to leave the world they had become so comfortable with in middle school and move on to the often scary and confusing world of high school. I think there may also be value in explaining to my students that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was believed to have also suffer from anxiety and depression throughout his life. By recognizing this fact and showing the ways in which he attempted to overcome this suffering that he had experienced for so long shown within the hopefulness of this poem, I think students could then realize that they too are capable of overcoming anxiety and depression if they are currently facing these oppressive forces or if they ever do face these things later in life.