Coleridge builds this short poem as a debate, and the two sides do not speak the same language. The first four lines give the voice of someone weighed down by despair, who argues that nobody consulted him before he was born: "No question was asked me." If life was a kind of question, "a thing sent to try," then living on is the answer YES, and the only possible NO is death. It sounds like logic, and the capital letters make it sound like a legal ruling. In the second half, Nature answers with a challenge. She does not say the speaker is wrong about consent. She changes the terms of the argument from rights to responsibility.
That change shows most clearly in the vocabulary. The speaker talks about questions and answers, which is the language of philosophy. Nature talks like a shopkeeper taking back a hired item: "Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear?" Life becomes a loan, and she tells the speaker to "make out the invent'ry; inspect, compare!" The clipped words ("Is't," "'twas," "invent'ry") make her sound brisk and unsentimental, like someone ticking off a list. The effect is startling, because the grandest question a person can ask is treated as a matter of accounts.
The list itself is the poem's most moving passage. Nature's gifts are "innocence," "hope," "health, and genius, and an ample scope." Here the rhythm changes. The opening quatrain gallops in triple beats (*Ere the BIRTH of my LIFE, if I WISHED it or NO*), which makes the speaker's argument sound quick and glib. The lines about the gifts settle into something close to a steady, five-beat line, as though they are being set down one at a time and given their full weight. The repeated "I gave you... Gave..." works like a hand laying items on a table. Then comes the bitter reversal: "Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair?" The odd, backward word order ("Return you me") makes the line sound like an accusation, and the three-item list of ruined things mirrors the list of gifts. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's loss is as much about what he has become as about what he was given.
The capitals deserve a second look. In the first half, YES and NO are the speaker's words, and they reduce everything to a switch with two positions. In Nature's reply, the capitals fall on ARE and WERE: "Think first, what you ARE! Call to mind what you WERE!" Here the stress is on time and change, on a self that has a past and so might have a future. Coleridge uses the same typographic trick twice, but the second use pulls against the first and undoes the speaker's neat binary.
The rhyme scheme also tightens as the poem goes on. The opening is two couplets (no/so, try/die). Nature's part is also couplets (wear/were, hope/scope) until the end, when the pattern stretches into a triple rhyme: despair, compare, dare. That third rhyme lands on the shortest line in the poem, "Then die--if die you dare!" It reads as a taunt. Because "die" is repeated, the line stays on the act itself, and the word "dare" turns it into a test of nerve. It is deliberately ambiguous. It could be contempt, or a last shock meant to make the speaker hesitate. It is not how one would speak to a person in real distress, and the poem seems aware of that. Nature is a character in an argument here, not a counsellor.
The poem matters because it compresses a huge moral question into eleven lines without claiming to settle it. It takes the despairing voice seriously enough to give it a tidy argument, and it lets the reply come from outside that logic, from a mind that counts what is lost instead of debating what is owed. The ending is a challenge, not a comfort, and that is why it is hard to forget. It leaves the reader with the unsettling suggestion that how we answer the question of our own lives may depend on whether we have really looked at what we hold.