Summary

The speaker begins by describing the love that he experiences even from prison. Althea comes to whisper to him through the grate of the prison. He touches her hair and looks in her eyes. He notes that the invisible divine spirits are less free than he is. He can enjoy a glass of wine with his beloved Althea, drowning their grief, which he compares to fish that cannot enjoy this pleasure. Someday, he insists, he will be able to praise the goodness of the king. He states that someday he will be able to “voice aloud” his sense of the king’s greatness (21). This, he says, makes him freer than the wind. He concludes at the end of the poem that, although he is physically imprisoned, he has the internal peace that turns a prison into a refuge of quiet and peace. His free...