I have lost/Beauties and feelings, such as would have been/Most sweet to my remembrance even when age/Hath dimm'd mine eyes to blindness!
This excerpt exemplifies the complex, twisting play with point of view, chronology, and imagination that characterizes Coleridge's style. The speaker notes that he is missing out on pleasant experiences by staying in the bower while his friends walk through the country. However, he expresses that regret by imagining a hypothetical future version of himself—one who has not missed out on these experiences—and imagining how meaningful the memory of the experiences would be to that future, elderly self. This complexity reflects the speaker's imaginative capabilities. Yet, in this moment, the speaker's vivid imagination lacks the liberatory power it will achieve later. Rather than use imagination to free himself from the bower's restrictions, he uses it in a way that makes him feel even more restricted and trapped than before.
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,/That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
At this point in the poem, the speaker has begun to vividly imagine his friends' circumstances, yet his imagination has not yet allowed him to empathize with them. Instead, he merely feels envious, and still negatively compares his own experience to that of his friends. The use of parentheses to contain an exclamation sets the speaker's own emotional reaction apart from his friends' feelings, showing that his appreciation of the natural world has not yet become a tool for empathizing with his loved ones. He is able to feel excited about nature, but he is not able to feel excited on behalf of his friends. This parenthetical appreciation contrasts with the word "Yes!" in the following stanza. That exclamation, unconfined by parentheses, exemplifies the empathetic melding of experiences that the speaker achieves.
for thou hast pined/And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,/In the great City pent,
Here, the speaker's imagination allows him not only to envision where his friends are physically, but also to understand how Charles feels. Rather than resenting Charles for being free to wander in the country while the speaker himself remains in the bower, he here uses his own confinement as a source of empathy to identify with Charles's own urban confinement. He concludes that, just as he himself longs to wander in nature, so Charles has longed to wander in nature, to an even more dramatic and difficult extent. Paradoxically, then, the speaker's feeling of being trapped actually becomes a tool of freedom—it allows him to relate to his friend, freeing him from the restrictions of his own identity, and from the trap of his own resentment.
and sometimes/'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,/That we may lift the soul, and contemplate/With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
Here, the speaker articulates an epiphany he has had while imagining his friends' walk—and the realization is a counterintuitive one. He claims that missing out on enjoyable experiences is a good thing, because imagining those experiences is a positive exercise, and is completely different from living them out in real life. This is quite different from claiming that imagination is a mere compensatory tool to ease the pain of exclusion. Rather, the speaker says, it is an equal and at times even superior route to fulfillment. Given the speaker's recent experiences, this epiphany makes sense. For him, imagination has had a positive impact on real life, causing him to perceive his surroundings and relate to his friends in far deeper and more fulfilling ways. It is not a substitute for experience, but it is equal to it, and deeply connected to it.
