When reading Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and “This Lime
Tree Bower My Prison,” I could not help but notice Coleridge’s use of Early
Modern English pronouns when addressing a person or personifying and object.
In “Frost at Midnight” he uses “thou” when he’s talking to
Hartley, and in “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” he uses “thou” and “thee” when
referring to his friend Charles, the sun and the ocean. An explanation for
using EME when addressing nature is to
allude to an earlier, pastoral time, which was idyllic and focused on Nature,
but why would he use it for people? It can’t allude to the same principle of
harkening back to an earlier time, because he talks about Hartley’s future.
Perhaps Coleridge sees the future as a much more pastoral place because Hartley
won’t grow up in a city “pent mid cloisters dim?”
Whatever the answer is, it certainly has an effect on the
reader to see EME pronouns in the midst of a poem written in Modern English.
great observation! Thee and thou would have also been understood as terms of address used by eighteenth-century Quakers, a religious sect that emphasized direct experience of Christ. More importantly for the poem, Quakers were also non-hierarchical in their form of worship: the congregation sat facing each other, and everyone (including women) was permitted to speak of their experiences. Quakers were known for their support of equal rights and tight knit community, which would reinforce the idea of community put forward in the poem.
ReplyDelete