Summary
As the frost “performs its secret ministry” in the windless
night, an owlet’s cry twice pierces the silence. The “inmates” of
the speaker’s cottage are all asleep, and the speaker sits alone,
solitary except for the “cradled infant” sleeping by his side. The
calm is so total that the silence becomes distracting, and all the
world of “sea, hill, and wood, / This populous village!” seems “inaudible
as dreams.” The thin blue flame of the fire burns without flickering;
only the film on the grate flutters, which makes it seem “companionable”
to the speaker, almost alive—stirred by “the idling Spirit.”
“But O!” the speaker declares; as a child he often watched
“that fluttering stranger” on the bars of his school window and
daydreamed about his birthplace and the church tower whose bells
rang so sweetly on Fair-day. These things lured him to sleep in
his childhood, and he brooded on them at school, only pretending to
look at his books—unless, of course, the door opened, in which case
he looked up eagerly, hoping to see “Townsman, or aunt, or sister
more beloved, / My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!”
Addressing the “Dear Babe, that sleep[s] cradled” by his
side, whose breath fills the silences in his thought, the speaker
says that it thrills his heart to look at his beautiful child. He
enjoys the thought that although he himself was raised in the “great
city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,” his child will wander in the rural
countryside, by lakes and shores and mountains, and his spirit shall
be molded by God, who will “by giving make it [the child] ask.”
All seasons, the speaker proclaims, shall be sweet to
his child, whether the summer makes the earth green or the robin
redbreast sings between tufts of snow on the branch; whether the
storm makes “the eave-drops fall” or the frost’s “secret ministry”
hangs icicles silently, “quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”
Form
Like many Romantic verse monologues of this kind (Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey” is a notable example), “Frost at Midnight” is written
in blank verse, a term used to describe unrhymed lines metered in
iambic pentameter.
Commentary
The speaker of “Frost at Midnight” is generally held to
be Coleridge himself, and the poem is a quiet, very personal restatement
of the abiding themes of early English Romanticism: the effect of
nature on the imagination (nature is the Teacher that “by giving”
to the child’s spirit also makes it “ask”); the relationship between
children and the natural world (“thou, my babe! shall wander like
a breeze...”); the contrast between this liberating country setting
and city (“I was reared / In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters
dim”); and the relationship between adulthood and childhood as they
are linked in adult memory.
