Summary
The poem begins with a dedication to Charles Lamb, Coleridge's friend and fellow-writer. Then it really gets going, with the speaker remarking that "they"—that is, the speaker's friends—have left, leaving the speaker in a bower of lime trees. The speaker compares the bower to a prison, not because it seems to be physically restraining him, but because it represents his inability to do as he'd like by joining his friends. In fact, he complains, by remaining in the bower he's lost all kinds of lovely experiences that he might otherwise have remembered fondly, even when he's old and blind. Meanwhile, he frets, he might never see his friends again. They're off wandering through nature. They're walking through the heath and scaling hills. They might even go visit a lovely dell that the speaker has told them about.
Analysis
This poem has a dedication, which means, in a sense, that there's an extra line squeezed in between the title and the start of the first stanza. The dedication is to Charles Lamb, a real friend of Coleridge (who, as we happen to know, left the injured Coleridge behind one day while he went for a hike). By referencing a recognizable figure from his own life, Coleridge somewhat blurs the boundaries between himself and his speaker. That is to say, while it's normally a good idea not to assume that a poem's speaker has anything in common with its writer, here we can assume that they're one and the same, or at least that the speaker has quite a bit in common with Coleridge. It also helps us ease into the first stanza. That first stanza begins abruptly with the words, "Well, they are gone." Some of that abruptness is eased by the fact that we already have some idea who he's talking about—a group of people including Charles Lamb.
It's easy to read this first quarter of the poem and not realize just how complex it is. It jumps through time and across perspectives dramatically, in a way we might associate with a long, epic novel. Here, those shifts are fast and somewhat subtle, but it's helpful to slow down and examine these shifts one at a time. The poem starts by establishing the basic conflict—that is, the speaker's being abandoned in the lime-tree bower. But the very first line splits our attention between two equal micro-scenes. The line's first half explains that the speaker's friends are gone. A comma divides it in half, and the half after the comma announces that the speaker remains. Scarcely have we learned that the lonely speaker is sitting in a bower than we delve into an odd, entangled hypothetical that takes us into an alternate future. Had he gone on the walk with his friends, the speaker says, he would have experienced feelings and sensations that he's now missing out on. Moreover, if he'd had those feelings and sensations, then they would have benefited him in the distant future, since he'd be able to look back and remember them. The maneuver of describing a hypothetical difference in his current situation, and then speculating about how his future self would have felt about the past if this hypothetical scenario was true, is a dizzying one. Once we've absorbed it, returning to the present, Coleridge whips us into a new perspective. We enter the friends' point of view, via the speaker's flight of fancy about what his friends must be doing. However, even this new point of view is deeply entangled with the speaker's. It's not just that he's the one imagining what his friends are up to, meaning that their perspective is really just an extension of his own. He also interjects, letting us know that he has a prior relationship to the dell that his friends might be visiting, and that he's the one who told them about this particular dell. So, while a moment ago we were tangled up in a complicated blend of past and present, now we're tangled in an equally complicated blend of points of view.
These entangled situations tell us that the speaker is both extremely free, contrary to the "prison" metaphor he uses to describe his situation, and that he's simultaneously very restricted. Even though he's not actually going anywhere, as he takes pains to tell us, he's able to use his imagination to leap through time and space, and even to enter other people's minds. Even though he's physically still, his mind roves so fast and so widely that we feel almost overwhelmed. At the same time, his active imagination is part of why he feels so trapped. Coleridge encourages us to sympathize with his speaker, but also lets us know that he's being a bit dramatic and self-pitying. After all, a bower of trees isn't remotely the same as a prison, and the speaker's fretting that he might never see his friends again seems like it comes from a place of paranoia and anxiety rather than realistic concern. Thus, the speaker's imagination grants him freedom in his time of restriction. But, paradoxically, he keeps using that freedom to imagine that he's far more restricted than he actually is. By the time we get about a quarter of the way through the poem, a new question has arisen: will he be able to break that cycle and use his mind to feel better?
