Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement is a poem written by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796. Like his earlier poem The Eolian Harp, it discusses Coleridge's understanding of nature and his married life, which was suffering from problems that developed after the previous poem. Overall, the poem focuses on humanity's relationship with nature in its various aspects, ranging from experiencing an Edenic state to having to abandon a unity with nature in order to fulfill a moral obligation to humanity. The discussion of man's obligation to each other leads into a discussion on the difference between the life of a philosopher and the life of a poet. By the end of the poem, the narrator follows the philosophical path in a manner similar to what Coleridge sought to do. The response to the poem from critics was mostly positive, with many of them emphasizing the religious aspects of the work in their analysis.

After marrying Sara Fricker in autumn 1795, Coleridge left their home at Clevedon and began to travel throughout England in order to meet with various philosophers and political theorists. In part, he was trying to meet with people so he could raise subscriptions for his various works. During this time, he would write home constantly to his pregnant wife and was concerned about her state of health. His feelings of guilt, along with a fever that he treated with laudanum, affected him greatly and caused him to express these feelings in a letter to Josiah Wade on 10 February 1796: "My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream! all one gloomy huddle of strange actions, and dim-discovered motives! Friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibilities."

After the letter, Coleridge returned to his wife who was now living with her family at Redcliffe Hill, Bristol. As he wrote The Eolian Harp to commemorate coming to his home at Clevedon, Coleridge composed Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement on leaving it. The poem was not included in Coleridge's 1796 collection of poems as it was probably still incomplete, but it was published in the October 1796 Monthly Magazine under the title Reflections on Entering into Active Life. A poem Which Affects Not to be Poetry. Reflections was included in Coleridge's 28 October 1797 collection of poems and the collections that followed. Of his early poems, Coleridge believed that Reflections was his best.

The poem begins with an idealisation of a "Valley of Seclusion":

[...] In the open air
Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the porch
Thick Jasmins twined: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion! [...]

— lines 4–9

The poem continues with a goodbye to the valley and asks if his life of pleasure was appropriate:

I was constrain'd to quit you. Was it right,
While my unnumber'd brethren toil'd and bled,
That I should dream away the entrusted hours
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use?