ABSTRACT
The effects of turning from expansive vistas to the narrow, particular scenes of daily life transcend the obvious physical, perceptual and aesthetic refinements that such a shift in perspective necessitates. As Coleridge illustrates in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” an awareness of and re-immersion in our immediate and present surroundings have the potential, by reinvigorating our sense of connectedness to life, to assuage feelings of displacement, isolation, even imprisonment. Such moments and experiences are, to be sure, exceptional, epiphanic, uncommon; to borrow Coleridge's term, they depend on a sudden usurpation of the familiar by the wondrous. Indeed, it is the wondrous that awakens the subject to the signifying excess, the sublimity, of everyday life. Wonder, one might say, redeems the everyday from the obscurity into which it falls through habituation and familiarity. For Coleridge, notably, the wonder of everyday life is also associated with the redemption of the subject—a redemption effected by a revitalized sense of “love and beauty.” Wonder, albeit a momentary state, is thus in itself a consolation; by casting a sudden light upon all that is hidden in full view, all that is familiar but unrealized, it invites a reinterpretation of, and a fundamental shift in the self ’s relation to, everyday life.
