‘Less gross than bodily’: Berkeleian Idealism in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’

This essay offers a reconsideration of the philosophy of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ (1797). While some previous critical accounts have been dismissive of the utility of applying George Berkeley’s thought to the poem, I argue that the poem draws on the part of Berkeley’s philosophy now known as subjective idealism. In A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley posits that all objects are simply collections of ideas, an idea’s existence consisting in its being perceived (‘ esse is percipi’). I contend that when Coleridge imagines Lamb ‘gazing round […] till all doth seem / Less gross than bodily, a living Thing / That acts upon the mind’, he is depicting Lamb as realizing that the world is composed of ideas that emanate from the powerful mind of God. The poem therefore occupies an important transitional point in Coleridge’s intellectual development when he was, briefly, a Berkeleian idealist.