Summary
The speaker continues to imagine what his friends are doing on their nature walk. He pictures them walking out of the woods and standing under the open sky, where they can look out at the hills and see the sea in the distance. Out in the water, boats are dotting the space between two islands—or maybe two shadows, the phrasing is ambiguous. They're all happy, but the speaker, directly addressing his friend Charles, imagines that Charles is even happier than the rest of them. He thinks about how badly Charles has missed nature during the years he's spent off in the big city, sadly enduring periods of pain and disaster. After dwelling on Charles's feelings, the speaker addresses the setting sun, which is sinking beneath the mountains and shining on the purple flowers. He addresses all the parts of nature glowing in the sunset, commanding them to shine in its light—from the flowers to the clouds to the groves of trees to the ocean. Then the speaker turns his attention back to Charles. But rather than addressing him, he imagines him in the third person, picturing how he silently but joyfully watches the scenery around him. The speaker imagines that, to Charles, the colors of the sunset actually look like the colors that surround God himself.
Analysis
In this part of the poem, the narrator's envy and bitterness seem to fade completely, overtaken by empathy and tenderness towards his friends. In the previous section, he contains his appreciation of the waterfall within parentheses, as if separating his own emotional response from that of his friends. In fact, he avoids speculating about how his friends are feeling at all: he simply describes the sights they see in the natural world, and then notes his own feelings about those sights. Here, things are different. After describing the tranquil beauty of the sea, the speaker squeezes in another exclamation of appreciation: the word "Yes!" This time it's not contained in parentheses. Instead, it sits right in the middle of a line describing the friends' movements. That tiny "Yes!" is a clue to us that, by simply imagining what his friends are doing, the speaker has broken down the barrier between himself and them. It's no longer necessary or indeed possible for him to separate his own reactions from the ones he thinks his friends must be having.
In fact, while the speaker was full of self-pity at the beginning of the poem, here his pity goes out towards someone else—his friend Charles, who we can reasonably infer is the Charles Lamb mentioned in the poem's dedication. He describes the way that Charles has been "pent" in the city, desperate to return to nature. He hints that Charles's life in the city has been marked by unusual tragedy and challenge, using the phrase "strange calamity!" (The real Charles Lamb's sister, who suffered from mental illness, killed his mother in 1796, an event to which this line may be referring). In a sense, Charles's troubles in the city are actually not so different from the speaker's own, though they seem more dramatic. While the speaker is stuck, isolated from his friends and the natural world in the lime-tree bower, Charles is stuck in the city, equally isolated from nature and his friends. Thus, while the speaker's sadness at being left in the bower originally isolated him from his friends, making him keenly feel his difference from them, it seems here to become a driver of empathy. He's managed to transcend the boundaries of ego, relating to Charles's feelings because he, too, loves nature and is temporarily unable to access it.
But the speaker quickly moves on from empathizing with Charles's feelings of restriction. Every possible restriction on his imagination fades away towards the end of this stanza as he embarks on a kind of ecstatic series of imperatives. He turns his attention, first to Charles, and then to the sun, flowers, clouds, and everything else he can think of. In doing so, he's not just talking to these objects in nature: he's empathizing with them. In some ways, this is a continuation of the entangled, complex games Coleridge played with point-of-view and chronology earlier in the poem. But while there, subtlety belied the underlying complexity, here he throws subtlety out the window. That earlier part of the poem was one long, winding sentence. This section of the poem is a collection of short, dramatic sentences, each of which ends with an exclamation point. Moreover, those earlier entanglements conveyed a feeling of being trapped. Here, the speaker is anything but trapped. He's radically free, able to feel a kinship with and even speak directly to all of nature. The only limit of his imagination and empathy is God himself: the speaker never addresses God or enters his point of view, but simply mentions his presence. By invoking God as a kind of limit to this imaginative freedom, Coleridge actually emphasizes just how free the speaker is in this moment. In other words, Coleridge demonstrates that the speaker's imagination has completely released him from the trapped feeling he has in the bower, allowing him to become one with everything around him to such an extreme extent that only God himself is remotely inaccessible.
