Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (359:201)

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Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poem Frost at Midnight looks into the relationship between happiness and the environment. In addition, he reflects upon the idyllic innocence of childhood. The poem’s construction wherein Hartley Coleridge, the poet’s baby, is the silent listener is important to the poet’s musings on the aforementioned themes. Coleridge is the speaker in the poem. Focusing on the abovementioned poem, this paper provides an analysis of how the poem’s images and language help the poet in formulating his theories of imagination, nature or memory. The paper also discusses the relationship between these concepts.
As the poem starts, Coleridge is sitting awake at night as frost is lacing the window. Everybody is sleeping, and Hartley Coleridge, his child, is sleeping beside the low fire. Coleridge forges poetic patterns in the poem to represent the workings of imagination and memory. In his description of the frost, Coleridge poetically mimics its reappearing shapes. When frost patterns are looked closely, they differ to some extent but repeat the same fundamental designs as they branch up the windowpane and replicate themselves. The poet ironically acknowledges that repetition in most cases hails and produces change; a facet of strangeness enters whatever is re-produced. As such, as the poem continues, the speaker imagines how the childhood of his child would be different from his own. It is notable that the poet himself grew up in the British capital of London, but Hartley Coleridge, as the speaker imagines, would grow up in the pastoral countryside wherein he would be able to “wander like a breeze, by sandy shores and lakes...” (Coleridge).
The power of the imagination is familiar in the poem. The poet laments his lack of creativity and originality as well as the aimlessness of his thoughts on the specific night of the setting of the poem. The imagination is linked to nature and to childhood. The speaker in the poem, S. T. Coleridge himself, desires the imaginative powers of his youth when he could sit in class on a hot and bright day during the summer season and imagine himself out-of-doors running through the rural countryside (Coleridge). The poet likens replication with change. This is one way in which Coleridge asserts that opposite qualities usually inhabit the same space.
At the start of Frost at Midnight, the speaker is sitting inside a quiet room in which even the fire hovers low and still. Coleridge illustrates a film of ash as it flaps on the grate, which was referred to as stranger in folkloric belief, and was believed to presage the arrival of an unanticipated visitor (Mahoney 247). Given that the only thing that is stirring in the quiet room is the film of ash, Coleridge suggests that this film is having “dim sympathies” with him, and he therefore equates his mind with this image of restlessness (Coleridge). Paradoxically, the poet’s descriptions of silence and quietness instill it with turbulence: “Tis calm indeed! So calm that it disturbs” (Coleridge).
Quietness according to him disturbs and vexes his thoughts. S...