Summary
In the second half of the first stanza, Coleridge's speaker describes the various sights that his friends are probably looking at. He imagines that they're in the dell he mentioned before, which is deep, forested, and sun-dappled. He imagines that the trunks of ash trees are arching over the rocks, while the few leaves that can grow in the damp dell tremble a bit in the wind created by the nearby waterfall. Then the speaker situates his friends in his elaborate mental image. He imagines them looking at the weeds by the waterfall, moving and dripping at the water's edge.
Analysis
In the early part of this stanza, Coleridge barely describes the bower where his speaker sits. But here, the speaker's imagination takes us into a detailed, lively version of the dell his friends are visiting. It seems as if the speaker is so invested in imagining his friends' location that he almost stops seeing his own. Beyond the sheer vividness of his descriptions, and the density of imagery used to describe the natural world here, the most striking element of these descriptions is the sense of movement that Coleridge conveys. Here, inanimate natural objects are much more full of life than are the humans who see them. The tree trunk "flings arching," while its leaves "tremble still,/Fann'd by the water-fall!" Meanwhile, the weeds "nod and drip." The only things that aren't moving here, as a matter of fact, are people. The speaker's friends are, we know, having an active day walking through nature. But when the speaker pictures them they simply "Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds." Indeed, while the speaker interjects to say that the weeds are "a most fantastic sight," that exclamation is confined to a set of parentheses, letting us know that it's his own musing—his friends purely behold, and don't even articulate judgments about what they see before them. Essentially, the speaker infuses nature with almost uncontainable liveliness, but turns human beings into near-inanimate observers.
It's interesting to think about this inversion in terms of the speaker's own envy and bitterness. He's upset about his own confinement to the bower, and envies his friends, who get to go out and look at nature. The vividness of his descriptions tells us that he deeply longs to go to the waterfall himself—so much so that he imagines it in depth. But, at the same time, by making his friends act like unmoving objects, he makes them more similar to himself. They're still and silent observers, no livelier than the speaker in his bower. Therefore, while the speaker is certainly using these lines to articulate how jealous he feels of his friends, he also subtly draws a parallel between himself and his friends. They are, as he imagines them, standing still and beholding nature. So, in a sense, is he, because even though he is also physically still, he's imagining nature so vividly that he feels as if he's looking at it. By robbing his friends (rhetorically) of their freedom and liveliness, he simultaneously exacts a tiny bit of revenge on them for leaving him, while also creating a bond between himself and his friends, imagining that they have this specific circumstance in common.
