FROST AT MIDNIGHT - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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FROST AT MIDNIGHT

                                                                                    -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

INTRODUCTION

‘Frost at Midnight’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a conversational poem, a form quite popular in the romantic age. In the poem, the poet, in a moment of solitude, gives voice to his most intimate feelings and expresses his beliefs about nature and the significant role it plays in the life of man. In fact, the poem is a very personal restatement of the abiding themes of English Romanticism.

ROMANTICISM

Coleridge dwells upon the effect of the beauty of nature on poetic imagination, the kinship of nature and man who endlessly seeks his own self and identity in the objects of the natural world, the role of Mother Nature in nourishing a child, the striking contrast between the claustrophobic city and the wide and open countryside where the mind can roam free. All these are typically romantic concerns that come up in the poet’s mind and finds expression in the verse monologue. This paper will attempt to analyze and understand these Romantic beliefs of Coleridge as expressed in the ‘Frost at Midnight’.

 HONORING THE NATURE

‘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’

The poet’s almost reverential love for the beauty of nature finds expression in the opening line of the poem: “The Frost performs its secret ministry/ Unhelped by any wind.” The frost is perceived as performing a secret and silent religious rite, magical and momentous in import. The silence of the night, the almost extinguished fire, the hooting of a solitary owl and the inaudible life surrounding the poet moves him rapture of bliss until he ecstatically cries out: Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village!Sea, and hill, and wood.

ABSTRUSER MUSINGS

‘Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature’

With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! The first twenty-three lines of the poem in fact sets the mood for the poet’s ‘abstruser musings’ that takes him down in an evocative journey down the memory lane and makes him dwell on the mystery of Mother Nature.

CONCLUSION

The ‘strange and extreme silentness’ allows Coleridge’s mind to roam freely seeking its own reflection in the objects of nature. The poet finds in the thin blue fluttering flame of an almost extinguished fire, a companion of his mind’s wanderings.

‘Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher!’

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