"Off limits" is the wording of a sign, the kind fixed to a gate or a door, and the title prepares us for a refusal. The three lines that follow turn that refusal inward. The speaker addresses his own body, "o my poor inward parts," and then describes it as a garden shut down "for want of room." The central idea seems to be crowding from within. Something has taken up so much space that the place where things once grew and were tended can no longer stay open, even to its owner. The poem never says what the crowding is. Illness, grief, anxiety or simply a life stuffed too full are all possible readings, and I would argue the poem's silence is deliberate, because it lets the feeling stay larger than any one cause.
The first line is a cry, but an oddly dressed one. The old-fashioned "o" gives it the tone of a lament, while "inward parts" is plain and slightly comic, a phrase that could mean organs, guts, or the hidden self, and perhaps all three. The speaker pities his insides the way one might pity a failing household or an ailing pet. Notice, too, that he says "parts," not "self." The inner life has been broken into pieces before the garden is even mentioned.
The garden is the poem's single image, and it is well chosen. A garden is cultivated, ordered and meant to be visited, so its closing is a loss of both beauty and hospitality. The phrasing is deadpan, almost municipal, as if a park had put up a notice. "Forced" is passive and names no culprit, so the closure feels imposed rather than chosen. And "want" is a double word. It means lack, but it also means desire, so "for want of room" holds both the shortage of space and a longing for it.
This middle line is also the poem's most orderly. It runs to ten syllables with five beats (a GAR-den FORCED to CLOSE for WANT of ROOM), which is the pattern of iambic pentameter. After the uneven, broken cry of line one, the steady rhythm sounds like composure returning, a calm announcement of bad news. The poem does not rhyme, and each line stands alone like a separate notice. The long vowels in "close," "room" and "poor" slow the voice down, and the repeated "f" in "forced" and "for" gives the line a slight pressure, as if the words themselves were being squeezed together.
The last line is the hardest to pin down: "only the unimaginable is saved." "Saved" can mean rescued, spared, redeemed, or stored away like a file. The sentence suggests that salvation is limited to what we cannot picture. One reading is bleak: everything we can name and imagine, every bed and path of the garden, is lost, and only what lies beyond our imagining survives. Another is consoling: behind the closed gate something is being kept safe precisely because it cannot be seen or described. The poem does not decide between them.
The sound of the line matters here. "Unimaginable" sprawls across six syllables and pushes the line past the tidy ten of its predecessor, then the poem stops dead on the blunt, one-syllable "saved." The word also has "image" buried in it, which is a quiet irony. The poem has just built an image, the garden, and it ends by saying that only what escapes imagery is kept.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does without any explanation. In three lines it moves from lament to understatement to paradox, and it gives a private, bodily distress a shape any reader can recognize. There is also a nice irony in its form. A poem about having no room leaves a great deal of room around its few words, and the reader is invited to stand in that empty space and decide what has been shut away, and what, unimaginably, has been saved.