Today’s Poem: Frost at Midnight

Revisiting Samuel Tayor Coleridge’s hymn to fatherly love

Thin blue flame on glowing embers (Wikimedia Commons)

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(Here at Poems Ancient and Modern we’re taking a Christmas sabbatical, with reprints of our favorite seasonal poems from last year. Our newer readers might have missed these selections the first time around, while our readers of longer duration may enjoy reading them again.)

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Frost at Midnight

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Frost performs its secret ministry, 
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry 
Came loud — and hark, again! loud as before. 
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, 
Have left me to that solitude, which suits 
Abstruser musings: save that at my side 
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs 
And vexes meditation with its strange 
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, 
With all the numberless goings-on of life, 
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame 
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; 
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, 
Making it a companionable form, 
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 
By its own moods interprets, every where 
Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 
And makes a toy of Thought. 
                  	But O! how oft, 
How oft, at school, with most believing mind, 
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, 
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft 
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt 
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, 
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang 
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 
Most like articulate sounds of things to come! 
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, 
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! 
And so I brooded all the following morn, 
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye 
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: 
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched 
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, 
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face, 
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, 
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! 
     	Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, 
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, 
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies 
And momentary pauses of the thought! 
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart 
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 
And in far other scenes! For I was reared 
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim, 
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear 
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 
Of that eternal language, which thy God 
Utters, who from eternity doth teach 
Himself in all, and all things in himself. 
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould 
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 
     	Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 
Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch 
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 
Heard only in the trances of the blast, 
Or if the secret ministry of frost 
Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 
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In February 1798, on the edge of Somerset’s Quantock Hills, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) sat drafting the first exploratory passages of his great poem, The Prelude. At the same time, his friend, collaborator, and neighbor Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was also at work on major poems of his own. 1798 would prove to be a breakthrough year for Wordsworth and Coleridge as artists, with the first publication of their joint project, the Lyrical Ballads. On any timeline of English literature, Lyrical Ballads is its own major event. In his famous preface to the second edition, Wordsworth declares a revolution in poetry: to vanquish the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of the eighteenth century with a poetic language rooted in “humble and rustic life . . . because in that condition the passions of men are are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”   

Early in the year, however, through the frozen nights, what preoccupied each poet was the writing of actual poems. Beside those poems, the abstractions of Wordsworth’s preface feel like so much earnest wind. Take today’s poem, Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” for example. In his The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, Adam Nicolson calls this poem “the greatest hymn to fatherly love ever written.” He is not wrong. In his early drafts of “The Prelude,” Wordsworth was sketching a reminiscent boyhood dream predominated by those “beautiful and permanent forms of nature” that make his soul. Meanwhile, the Coleridge of “Frost at Midnight” both laments the city-boundedness of his own boyhood and rejoices in the better life, nourished by the goodness of a natural place, that he envisions for the sleeping child in the cradle at his knee, the child whose soul is as hungry and alive as the fire in the grate. What are the generalized “passions of men” to the particularity of that moment, that new person asleep in his cradle in the dark, still night?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Wikimedia Commons)

This father commits himself to the reflexive vow of every good parent: You will have it better than I did. But how beautiful Coleridge makes it all, in pliant, unadorned blank verse. It’s worth noting the places where, particularly at the beginnings of lines, the substitution of a trochee for an iamb shifts some detail into high relief. The way the “thin blue flame / Lies” on the embers, for example, becomes through this emphasis a more active action, against the backdrop of the dwindling fire’s repose. Even in the utter stillness and dormancy of the winter night, some life is crackling, “in dim sympathy” with the poet-speaker, also awake in a sleeping world.

By contrast, in the second long paragraph stanza, the speaker’s own school experiences appear starkly in these trochaic substitutions: “Awed by the stern preceptor’s face,” “Fixed with mock study.” The poem moves through these details of self-alienation and dullness, recalling the boy’s longing to see, in whatever face appeared at the door, some loved person — but more than that, to see the blue flame’s aliveness crackling in another human soul. The poem cycles through those lonely memories and back to the moment at hand: vivid in its immediacy, pregnant with hope for the future, and drawing around the sleeping child a circle of inviolable peace. 

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ADDENDUM: In the months since I first wrote this piece, I have written another response to Coleridge’s poem, which I love very much and obviously carry in my mind even when I’m not aware of it. This poem, “Coleridge at Midnight,” first appeared in a recent issue of First Things and now seems to be out from behind the paywall — so in case you missed it, now seems as good a time as any to link to it here.

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