News at Eleven: "I mean to work very hard, as cook,

butler, scullion, shoe-cleaner, occasional muse, gardener, hind, pig-protector, chaplain, secretary, poet, reviewer and omnium-botherum shilling-scavenger . . ." [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge promised Poole, whose garden backed on to Coleridge's through a lime-tree bower.

Coleridge planted vegetables and reared pigs, happy in a decaying mice-infested 17th-century cottage with a thatched roof that he referred to fondly as "the hovel". Within a year, he'd also written some of his most famous poetry: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, The Lime Tree Bower my Prison and the opium-inspired Kubla Khan.

from The Sydney Morning Herald: Chapters and verse

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