The speaker compares himself to a "committed linnet", or finch, and celebrates the title character, imagining himself "tangled in her hair" and "fettered to her eye", much preferring the restraining effects of love to the literal restraints he must deal with.
This poem ends each of its 4 stanzas with the same invocation, though the last line becomes a positive statement with the insertion of the word "enjoy". The speaker compares himself to a "committed linnet", or finch, and celebrates the title character, imagining himself "tangled in her hair" and "fettered to her eye", much preferring the restraining effects of love to the literal restraints he must deal with. FTP identify this 1649 work by Robert Lovelace that includes the lines "Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage."
This poem ends each of its 4 stanzas with the same invocation, though the last line becomes a positive statement with the insertion of the word "enjoy".
To Althea, from Prison