The Full Text of “Frost at Midnight”
1The Frost performs its secret ministry,
2Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
3Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
4The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
5Have left me to that solitude, which suits
6Abstruser musings: save that at my side
7My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
8'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
9And vexes meditation with its strange
10And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
11This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
12With all the numberless goings-on of life,
13Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
14Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
15Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
16Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
17Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
18Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
19Making it a companionable form,
20Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
21By its own moods interprets, every where
22Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
23And makes a toy of Thought.
24 But O! how oft,
25How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
26Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
27To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
28With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
29Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
30Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
31From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
32So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
33With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
34Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
35So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
36Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
37And so I brooded all the following morn,
38Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
39Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
40Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
41A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
42For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
43Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
44My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
45 Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
46Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
47Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
48And momentary pauses of the thought!
49My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
50With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
51And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
52And in far other scenes! For I was reared
53In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
54And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
55But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
56By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
57Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
58Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
59And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
60The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
61Of that eternal language, which thy God
62Utters, who from eternity doth teach
63Himself in all, and all things in himself.
64Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
65Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
66 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
67Whether the summer clothe the general earth
68With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
69Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
70Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
71Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
72Heard only in the trances of the blast,
73Or if the secret ministry of frost
74Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
75Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
The Full Text of “Frost at Midnight”
1The Frost performs its secret ministry,
2Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
3Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
4The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
5Have left me to that solitude, which suits
6Abstruser musings: save that at my side
7My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
8'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
9And vexes meditation with its strange
10And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
11This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
12With all the numberless goings-on of life,
13Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
14Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
15Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
16Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
17Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
18Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
19Making it a companionable form,
20Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
21By its own moods interprets, every where
22Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
23And makes a toy of Thought.
24 But O! how oft,
25How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
26Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
27To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
28With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
29Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
30Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
31From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
32So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
33With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
34Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
35So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
36Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
37And so I brooded all the following morn,
38Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
39Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
40Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
41A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
42For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
43Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
44My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
45 Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
46Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
47Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
48And momentary pauses of the thought!
49My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
50With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
51And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
52And in far other scenes! For I was reared
53In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
54And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
55But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
56By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
57Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
58Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
59And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
60The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
61Of that eternal language, which thy God
62Utters, who from eternity doth teach
63Himself in all, and all things in himself.
64Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
65Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
66 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
67Whether the summer clothe the general earth
68With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
69Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
70Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
71Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
72Heard only in the trances of the blast,
73Or if the secret ministry of frost
74Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
75Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
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“Frost at Midnight” Introduction
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"Frost at Midnight," originally published in 1798, is generally considered one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's best conversation poems—a type of poem that Coleridge created in which a speaker mulls over different topics as if in conversation with the reader. In this poem, the speaker sits up late at night in a rural cottage, his infant sleeping by his side. The speaker thinks about his own youth before turning to his hopes for his young child's future. Full of evocative natural imagery and religious meditations, the poem captures the gentle, drifting late-night thoughts of a parent.
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“Frost at Midnight” Summary
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The winter frost secretly goes about its holy tasks without any help from the wind. The baby owl cried out loudly, and—listen!—cries out just as loud again. The other residents of my little country house are all asleep, leaving me alone—which is fine by me, since it gives me the chance to ponder some obscure thoughts—except for my baby sleeping peacefully in a cradle next to me. It's very calm tonight! In fact, it's so calm that my thoughts are disrupted by the unusual and extreme quiet. The sea, the hills, the forest—this town full of people! The sea, the hills, the forest, with all the endless things going on inside them, are as silent as dreams! There's only a small blue flame in my fireplace, where the fire's dying, and it doesn't move. Only the film of soot on the grate of the fire place is still fluttering, the one thing in my surroundings that isn't peaceful. Its movement amid all this stillness makes me (who actually is alive) feel like I can relate to it. It's like a companion that is similar to me. My mind interprets the soot's tiny movements as reflections of my own thoughts—everywhere I look, my mind finds echoes or mirrors of itself. As a result, thought become something trivial and easily manipulated.
Oh! How often—how often!—when I was at school and my mind would believe anything and I was alert to omens, would I look deeply into the grate of the fireplace. There I watched the soot fluttering around like a strange visitor. And just as often, with my eyes open, I would have already dreamt about my hometown. I dreamt about the old church tower whose bells, the only music that those living in poverty had, would ring all day during the hot fair. These bells sounded so lovely that they filled me with an uncontrollable joy. Their sounds came to my ears just like words from the future. And so when I was at school I would look into the fire until these soothing dreams helped me fall asleep, and sleep in turn continued these dreams. And then I'd keep thinking about them all the next morning, while sitting in terror of the strict teacher's face. I'd stare straight at my book, pretending to read, while my daydreams made the words feel like they were swimming. However, if anyone opened the door just a bit, I would look up quickly and slyly, and my heart would skip a beat. I still was hoping to see someone's face, someone I didn't know, or someone from my hometown, or my aunt, or my sister, whom I loved so much—who was my play mate back when we were so young they dressed us in the same clothes.
My dear infant child, sleeping in your cradle at my side, with your gentle breaths that I can hear in this totally calm night, your breaths fill all the moments of silence and emptiness in my thoughts! My dear beautiful child! It fills me with gentle happiness to look at you and know that you won't have to grow up like I did. Instead, you'll learn other things and in other places! After all, I was raised in the big city, shut up in dark schools. I didn't see any beautiful things except for the sky and stars. But you, my child, you'll get to explore nature like a drifting breeze, wandering by lakes and beaches, under the cliffs of old mountains, under clouds, whose size mimics the size of lakes and beaches and cliffs. As a result, you'll see and hear the signs and words of the eternal language that God speaks. From God's realm in eternity, he teaches people how he made everything, and how everything leads back to God. He teaches everyone about everything. He will form your soul, and by teaching it make it ask more questions.
As a result, all the seasons will be pleasant to you. It will be pleasant if summer covers the earth with green, or if a robin sits and sings between clumps of snow on the empty branch of an apple tree, while mist rises from the straw roof drying under the sun. It will be pleasant whether the sound of rain dripping from the roof is heard only by the howling wind, or if the secret tasks of frost hangs the dripping rain as icicles, which silently shine in the silent moonlight.
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“Frost at Midnight” Themes
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The Divinity of Nature
The speaker of “Frost at Midnight” believes that people can become closer to God through nature. Since God created the natural world, the poem implies, it follows that lakes and forests and mountains are like God’s language; communing with nature, then, is a way of communing with God. The divinity of nature ultimately teaches people how to find spiritual fulfillment, whether in the depths of winter or the heights of summer.
This idea that nature is the language of God becomes clearest at the end of the poem, when the speaker says that “lakes and shores / And mountain crags” are the “lovely shapes and sounds” in God’s “eternal language.” In other words, God communicates through the sights and sounds of nature, using the natural world to speak to human beings. More specifically, God “doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself.” In other words, through things like clouds and mountains and lakes, God teaches people about himself, and about how everything ultimately comes from God. According to the speaker, people who study the natural world find that God is the source of all things.
The speaker seems to suggest that nature in fact teaches people the most important things about existence itself. And when people learn from God through nature, they find peace and fulfillment. The speaker believes that God can “mould” the “spirit” of those who spend time in nature. That is, in immersing themselves in the world that God created, people can fill their very souls with the language of God, which will "mould"—or shape—them positively. As a result, people can develop spiritually when they spend time in nature. For such people, “all seasons shall be sweet.” Whether it is summer or winter, they have a sense of spiritual well-being because they are close to God.
Ultimately, the speaker concludes that time spent in nature is the best thing for a person’s soul. God created the natural world, and it's through this world that God speaks to people—teaching them how he created everything and is the source of all peace and fulfillment.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Childhood, Nature, and Hope
The speaker grew up feeling lonely and isolated at an urban school, and the poem reflects the hope of many parents that their kids will have it better than they themselves did. Holding his “cradled infant,” the speaker talks about wanting his child to grow up amid nature, which he argues will be much more fulfilling than city life.
Speaking to his infant child, the speaker presents being raised in “the great city” as a stifling, deeply lonely experience. His descriptions create a claustrophobic atmosphere; he was “pent 'mid cloisters dim / And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.” In other words, when the speaker was a kid, the city crowded out all beautiful things except the sky above. Making matters worse, the speaker went to a school in the city where the teacher was a “stern preceptor[].” Clearly feeling lonely and isolated in this urban environment, the speaker would spend all day hoping that a “Townsman, or aunt, or sister” would show up. For him, the city was the worst place to spend childhood.
The speaker also clearly loves his child, and apparently mentions all this because he wants something different for that child—specifically, a youth spent closer to nature. Instead of leaving home to go school in the city, the speaker imagines the child having a youth filled with freedom and fulfillment within the natural world.
This speaker imagines, for example, that his child will “wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores.” In other words, the speaker’s child shall be free as wind, and be immersed in beautiful natural sights. Enthusiastically describing such a childhood, the speaker clearly believes it will be “sweet” in “all seasons”—the best youth the speaker’s child could have.
Instead of having a “stern preceptor” (i.e., a strict teacher) the speaker imagines his child being taught by God himself. In nature, according to the speaker, his child will “see and hear / The lovely shapes and sounds” of God. In other words, God will teach the speaker’s child through the sights and sounds of nature. The speaker’s child will feel free and spiritually fulfilled, wandering through beautiful nature and learning from God himself.
It thus fills the speaker with “tender gladness” to think that his child won’t have to grow up in the city and go to such a repressive boarding school. Instead, his child will have freedom out in nature, where God himself will teach the child everything that needs to be known.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Environment and State of Mind
For the speaker, environments have a big effect on how people think and feel. Throughout the poem, the speaker describes how surroundings can both guide and interrupt one’s thoughts. The mind is intimately linked to its surroundings, the poem implies, and as such different environments can conjure different moods, bring up old memories, and even create anticipation for the future.
From the beginning of the poem, the speaker emphasizes the way that his environment affects how he thinks, sometimes helping his thoughts progress, other times hindering them from getting anywhere. For example, the speaker begins by describing the winter night, with its slow onset of frost and the “owlet’s cry.” The “solitude” of such a night “suits” the speaker, granting the space to think. As a result, the speaker’s thoughts depend on this wintry environment—after all, the poem is called “Frost at Midnight.”
Soon after, however, the speaker also describes how this kind of night “disturbs / And vexes meditations”—that is, sometimes it interrupts or frustrates trains of thoughts. Here, the speaker captures how environments can impede people’s thoughts, so that their minds wander, or they have a hard time getting into the right headspace. The beginning of the poem, then, captures the two extremes when it comes to how surroundings can affect people’s thoughts: either helping them work through things, or distracting them at every turn.
The speaker’s environment also leads him to recall powerful memories that are saturated with a sense of place. These memories capture how people’s environments can both transport them into the past and be full of anticipation for the future. For instance, soot in the fireplace leads the speaker to recall looking at soot as a child: at boarding school, the speaker would stare into the fireplace and dream about his “sweet birth place” (his home). In other words, the sooty fireplace is associated with memories of looking into the fire as a kid. This moment captures how surroundings can trigger memories, and how memories are often soaked in impressions of a particular place.
Other times, places can seem to conjure the future. For instance, the sound of church bells on “the hot Fair-day […] stirred and haunted” the speaker. The bells seemed to be full of “articulate sounds of things to come.” In other words, the fair day and its pervasive bells made the speaker feel anticipation, sensing that exciting things were going to happen in the future.
In the present moment, though, the adult speaker greatly values serene environments. The poem ends on tranquil images of the natural world that are meant to resonate with the reader, capturing how an environment can create a sense of peace. In the last stanza, the speaker lyrically conjures different seasons. The speaker describes, for example, “summer cloth[ing] the general earth / With greenness,” and “silent icicles / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.” These images are imbued with a deep sense of stillness and peace. It’s as if these final lines create an environment and state of mind for the reader, so that the reader shares the speaker’s tranquility. By creating this shared environment for both reader and speaker, the poem ends on a deep, resonant feeling of peace.
Throughout the poem, then, the speaker describes how his surroundings guide his thoughts, transporting him through many memories and moods and concluding with the images of the happiness that natural surroundings provide.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Frost at Midnight”
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Lines 1-6
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:"Frost at Midnight" is one of Coleridge's most famous poems, and is often considered among the best of his so-called "conversation poems." Compared to other poems written at the time—and to most poems written in English before then—Coleridge's conversation poems have a distinctly personal feel to them. In "Frost at Midnight," a speaker mulls over his life and surroundings late at night, talking about things as they happen outside or as they pop into his head. As a result, the poem feels like a piece of an intimate conversation the speaker is having with the reader.
The poem takes place in a cottage late at night. The speaker is up while everyone else has gone to bed. His young child is sleeping in a cradle next to him. Outside, it's winter, and "Frost performs its secret ministry." In other words, frost (a thin coat of ice) is forming on the landscape.
"[M]inistry" refers to the tasks of a minister (i.e., a priest). Right off the bat, then, the speaker hints at the feeling that there is something sacred about nature. This sacredness has a "secret" quality to it, in that it's happening outside, unobserved, while a baby owl cries again and again. Apart from this cry, the night is mysteriously still and quiet—so still that it's as if the speaker can sense the frost forming. As a result of this stillness, the speaker can let his mind delve into "abstruser musings"—that is, into obscure thoughts, the kind of things people ponder when they're up late at night.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter, a meter of five iambs per line (feet with a da-DUM rhythm):
Unhelped | by a- | ny wind. | The owl- | et's cry
Although the speaker follows this meter relatively closely, it's also pretty unobtrusive. In fact, the meter lends the poem a relaxed, spoken feel. It doesn't feel like the speaker is trying to dress things up too much. Instead, the speaker describes things as they happen or pop into his mind, such as when the speaker hears the baby owl's cry, "The owlet's cry / Came loud," and then hears it a second time: "and hark, again! loud as before." Here, it's as if the poem is happening real time, as if the reader is sitting next to the speaker and his baby in their warm, cozy cottage.
This conversational feel doesn't mean that the speaker doesn't strive for evocative or precise language. In fact, throughout the poem, the speaker describes his surroundings very carefully. Yet he doesn't make these descriptions overly flowery. Instead, he just tries capture, in relatively unadorned language, how different images appear to him in the moment.
Of course, no one these days talks like this. But while the poem's language may feel elevated and composed to modern-day readers, to Coleridge's contemporary readers it felt daringly informal. Many had a hard time seeing its beauty. So, beneath the friendliness and cozy descriptions, there is radical innovation and a measure of risk-taking—the speaker is going out on a limb to address the reader in this way, extending a perhaps improper invitation to his own intimate thoughts.
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Lines 6-11
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! -
Lines 11-16
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. -
Lines 17-19
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form, -
Lines 20-23
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. -
Lines 24-29
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, -
Lines 29-34
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! -
Lines 35-39
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: -
Lines 40-44
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! -
Lines 45-48
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! -
Lines 49-54
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. -
Lines 55-59
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: -
Lines 59-65
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. -
Lines 66-71
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; -
Lines 71-75
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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“Frost at Midnight” Symbols
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Frost
In "Frost at Midnight," Frost symbolizes the sacredness or divinity of nature.
Images of frost bookend the poem. At the beginning, the speaker says, "The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind." "[M]inistry" is the key word here. It refers to the duties of a minister, or priest. In other words, the speaker is personifying frost as a priest. As a result, the frost seems to be up to something that is both sacred and mysterious.
On a literal level, all that's happening is that ice is forming silently outside. But for the speaker, there's something holy about this ice. As he goes on to elaborate, the speaker believes that all of nature is part of the "eternal language" of God. As a result, even frost can come to seem like one of God's priests.
At the end of the poem, the speaker describes how:
[...] the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang [rain drops] up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.Here, the speaker fleshes out what exactly frost's "secret ministry" is, whimsically imagining the priestly frost hanging icicles drop by frozen drop from the edges of the roof. As before, this image suggests that even the formation of icicles is part of the sacred language of God. The image conveys a sense of "sweet" peace, a sense that anyone who feels close to God is also close to nature, and vice-versa.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Soot
The film of soot in the fireplace symbolizes the speaker's own mind and is also specifically linked to his memories of isolation at boarding school.
In the first stanza, the speaker describes the soot as "the sole unquiet thing" in the cabin. It "flutters" with "puny flaps and freaks." These erratic movements make the speaker think of his own mind. The soot is like an "Echo or mirror" of his "Spirit." He feels that he, like soot, keeps fluttering around in his thoughts. Rather than thinking clearly and deeply, and rather than achieving a feeling of stillness and peace, the speaker's mind is anxious, unsettled, jumpy. Thus, this early description of the soot reflects how the poem itself will progress, not logically or linearly, but in unpredictable fits and starts.
Additionally, the soot is linked to the speaker's memories of boyhood, particularly boarding school. At school, he would also stare into the fire, dreaming about his hometown. He was homesick. According to Coleridge, the film of soot that forms on a grate is colloquially known as the stranger, and it's supposed to signal the arrival of an old friend. The speaker hoped it might signal the arrival of someone from his home, perhaps his sister. Again, then, the soot captures something about the speaker's mind: this time, the power of his school day memories and the sense of isolation associated with them.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Church Bells
In the speaker's memories of his home town, church bells symbolize the connection between art, religion, and the environment, as well as how external environments can evoke powerful feelings within people.
As the speaker mentions in line 30, church bells were "the poor man's only music." In this era before recorded music, people who couldn't afford to hear live music mainly got to hear it at church. This means that, for such people, art and religion were closely connected.
Additionally, in this case, music isn't heard at the church but out in the town as the church bells ring. This music fills the air, soaking the environment in its suggestive sound. As a result, art, religion, and the physical environment begin to fuse. This provides an early example for the speaker of how all these things can be connected. After all, the poem "Frost at Midnight" itself is an attempt to use art to talk about how God and nature are connected.
Additionally, the sound of the bells evokes a powerful feeling in the speaker; the bells "stirred and haunted me, / With a wild pleasure," he says. In fact, the bells seem full of the "articulate sounds of things to come." That is, to the young speaker, the bells sound like words from the future. Here, then, the sound of church bells symbolizes how environments can suggest things beyond themselves, such as the future (and later, God), awakening powerful feelings in people.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Frost at Midnight” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
Apostrophe is a central device in the second half of "Frost at Midnight." Beginning in the third stanza, the speaker addresses his sleeping infant directly. Although the baby is sleeping, and so doesn't hear or respond to this address, this apostrophe nonetheless conveys the speaker's deep love and hope for his child. (Note that while the entire third to fourth stanzas are apostrophe, we've specifically highlighted the moments where the speaker explicitly begins and repeats this address—"Dear babe," etc.)
The introduction of apostrophe in the third stanza represents a significant shift in the poem. In the first two stanzas, the speaker isn't explicitly talking to anyone. He simply begins by describing the night: "The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind." As with so many lyric poems, the speaker is basically talking to the reader. In fact, the speaker talks as if the reader is right there with him, as when he describes the cry of a baby owl: "The owlet's cry / Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before." In effect, the speaker asks the reader to listen as the owl cries out again. The speaker acts as if the reader can hear the owl too, as if the reader is sitting next to him in the cottage. The first half of the poem, then, becomes like one part of late night conversation between speaker and reader—one reason that this poem is typically classified as one of Coleridge's so-called conversation poems.
This changes in the second half of the poem. At the beginning of the third stanza, the speaker directly address his child: "Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side." And again a few lines later: "My babe so beautiful!" And again "But thou, my babe!" Throughout the rest of the poem, the speaker talks specifically to his child, telling the baby about his life, his views on religion and education, and his hopes for the child. The poem shifts gear from the speaker's reflections on his own life and feelings of isolation (such as sitting up at night while everyone is asleep, or being homesick at boarding school as a child). Now, the speaker devotes his attention to another life, the life of his child.
Of course, the sleeping infant doesn't hear the speaker. As a result, this apostrophe isn't meant to literally communicate with the child. Rather it represents a change in the speaker's mindset as he opens himself up to hopes about nature and spirituality. It functions almost as a kind of prayer or blessing, in which the speaker articulates certain goals for his child—both so that the speaker will be better able to achieve them, and perhaps hoping that God will hear and make them come true.
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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Simile
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Imagery
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Personification
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Repetition
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"Frost at Midnight" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Frost
- Ministry
- Owlet
- Inmates
- Cottage
- Abstruser
- Musings
- Vexes
- Meditation
- Wood
- Film
- Grate
- Sympathies
- Freaks
- Idling
- Spirit
- Toy
- Oft
- Presageful
- Grazed
- Stranger
- Unclosed Lids
- Morn
- Fair-day
- Mine
- Articulate Sounds
- Soothing
- Brooded
- Preceptor
- Swimming
- Babe
- Intersperséd
- Vacancies
- Lore
- Pent 'mid cloisters dim
- Nought
- Crags
- Image
- Bulk
- Intelligible
- Mould
- General earth
- Betwixt
- Night-thatch
- Sun-thaw
- Eave-drops
- Trances
- Blast
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A thin layer of ice that forms on the landscape overnight.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Frost at Midnight”
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Form
"Frost at Midnight" has 75 lines broken up into in four unrhymed verse paragraphs. As this phrase suggests, verse paragraphs are a lot like prose paragraphs except they have line-breaks. They are stanzas of unequal length that help break up the poem into more manageable chunks.
By writing in this way, the poem emphasizes its somewhat informal language. Rather than setting out with stanzas of pre-determined length, the poem works more intuitively. Each stanza is roughly unified in what it's talking about:
- The first is full of descriptions of the speaker's cottage;
- The second describes the speaker's childhood;
- The third addresses the speaker's hopes for his child;
- The fourth is full of descriptions of the natural world.
Furthermore, each stanza break represents a leap within the speaker's mind. For instance, between the first and second stanzas the speaker leaps from describing his fireplace to delving into an old memory.
Additionally, this form has a long and prestigious history. Coleridge was perhaps most explicitly inspired by John Milton's use of blank verse paragraphs in his epic poem Paradise Lost. However, while Milton's language captured the epic conflict between good and evil at the beginning of the world, Coleridge's language is meant to convey the twists at turns of an individual mind on one ordinary evening. As a result, it puts the flexibility of Milton's form to new use.
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Meter
"Frost at Midnight" is written in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter (meaning there are five feet per line, each with a da-DUM beat pattern). The first line is a straightforward example of the poem's meter:
The Frost | performs | its se- | cret min- | istry
Iambic pentameter mimics the rhythms of spoken English, and thus makes sense in a poem meant to feel conversational. Much of the poem follows this pattern fairly faithfully. By hewing closely to the meter, the poem provides a sense of regularity as the speaker's thoughts leap through memories and observations.
Additionally, the poem's extensive use of enjambment and caesura helps carve up the stable meter in interesting ways. For instance, here's lines 8-10:
'Tis calm | indeed! | so calm, | that it | disturbs
And vex- | es med- | ita- | tion with | its strange
And ex- | treme si- | lentness. | Sea, hill, | and wood,Here, although the first two lines continue to maintain a steadfast iambic pentameter, caesura and enjambment break things up so that they don't feel boring or monotonous.
Next, notice how the third line does vary the meter, particularly by bunching stresses. The second and fourth feet are both spondees (DUM-DUM). This creates an emphatic effect that mirrors that speaker's growing sense of unease. The condensed stress captures the "extreme silentness" of the landscape. Similarly, the stresses of "Sea, hill, and wood" suggest the speaker almost exclaims this phrase. He is suddenly jerked out of his innermost thoughts, and instead passionately evokes the surrounding landscape.
There are moments like this throughout the poem. Although the speaker mostly sticks closely to the meter, he's not afraid to deviate for emphasis or to add some variety.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Frost at Midnight" does not rhyme. Because the poem attempts to capture some of the informal qualities of conversational English, while also depicting the twists and turns of the speaker's thoughts, rhyme would only be a hindrance. It would seem artificial, given that people don't usually follow rhyme schemes when they're talking to each other or thinking to themselves!
Additionally, Coleridge was partly inspired here by the blank verse of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. By rejecting rhyme (a choice that was controversial at the time), Milton was able to craft a fluid and sinewy kind of language, a language that was full of interesting variety in terms of its grammar and arrangement of words. By embracing a similarly rhyme-less form, Coleridge is able to craft sentences that are uniquely his—that bear that stamp of his own unique thought processes.
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“Frost at Midnight” Speaker
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The speaker of "Frost at Midnight" is often taken to be Coleridge himself (which is why we've used masculine pronouns throughout this guide), though it doesn't necessarily have to be. However, the speaker is clearly someone who has had many of same life experiences as Coleridge, such as going to boarding school in London and caring for a new-born child while living in a cottage.
Furthermore, the style of the poem is meant to emphasize that this is not some generic speaker, but a specific person with specific life experiences. Some poems are written as if they could be spoken by almost anyone (like Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18," or Emily Dickinson's "I felt a funeral, in my Brain," or T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"). Coleridge's poem, however, clearly has a flesh-and-blood speaker with a unique biography. In this way, "Frost at Midnight" has sometimes been thought of as an early example of so-called confessional poetry, poetry that explicitly takes the events of the poet's life as its focus.
Again, though, it's not necessary to identify the poem completely with Coleridge. A reader doesn't need to know every detail of Coleridge's biography to appreciate the poem. Rather, a reader enjoys the poem because it gives the sense of getting to know a particular person, of this person intimately revealing their thoughts and feelings as they occur. In other words, for the reader, the poem is a way to get to know Coleridge—or at the very least, to get to know the voice that Coleridge crafts for himself in this poem. And for Coleridge, the poem is a chance for him to think through his own life, to find a voice that can make sense of all the ideas and feelings swarming around in his head.
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“Frost at Midnight” Setting
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Coleridge wrote this poem while living in a cottage in the large village of Nether Stowey, in Somerset in South West England. For the reader of the poem, what matters is that it takes place in a small cottage in the middle of a winter night. Frost is forming on the ground outside, and it is very quiet. Everyone has gone to bed besides the speaker, who sits in front of the dying fire with his sleeping baby by his side. The poem is rooted in this cozy, quiet, sweetly lonely scene.
From there, it delves into memories, hopes, and imagined scenes. In the speaker's mind, he travels back to boarding school, then to a festival day in his birthplace, then to magnificent landscapes, and finally back to the present winter night. The speaker describes these imagined settings in vivid terms, emphasizing his emotional connection to each of them.
As these descriptions progress, a split begins to emerge. On one side of the split are environments that provoke a sense of isolation, such as the winter cottage (at least at the beginning of the poem), boarding school, and cities. On the other side of the split are surroundings that create a feeling of openness and closeness to God, particularly "the hot Fair-day," and the scene of "lakes and sandy shores" and "ancient mountain." Ultimately, the speaker seems to reconcile this split, because at the end of the poem he finds peace in his isolated cottage, describing "silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Frost at Midnight”
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Literary Context
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is part of the first generation of English Romantic poets. Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that spread through Europe and America from the late 1700s through the 1800s (this poem was published in 1798). There are many ideas and artistic practices associated with Romanticism, but in terms of Coleridge it is possible to hone in on the body of work produced by him and his friend William Wordsworth.
Together, Coleridge and Wordsworth developed a vision of how God spoke to human beings through nature. They believed that if people wanted to understand reality, they had to examine their own experiences in the natural world. Thus, for these two poets, personal memories were of the utmost importance. After people had passionate or spiritually significant events out in nature, it was through memory that they came to understand the full significance of such events. This link between memory, nature, God, and human understanding is on display in "Frost at Midnight." It would be most thoroughly developed in Wordsworth's long, autobiographical poem, The Prelude.
In fact, although The Prelude is heavily indebted to "Frost at Midnight," it eventually eclipsed this earlier poem. Coleridge felt that Wordsworth had gone far beyond him, proving himself the superior poet. At the same time, Coleridge's poem paved the way for Wordsworth. Both poets had wanted to find a way to use the kind of blank verse found in Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost as a means of exploring inner thoughts and feelings (rather than depicting awesome battles between angels, as Milton had done). It was Coleridge, in his conversation poems, such as the one here, that first began to work out how this could be done.
It should also be noted that "Frost at Midnight" only represents one side of Coleridge's life as a poet. On the other side is what has been called a "demonic" interest in the supernatural, as exemplified in his famous poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." These poems, which are distinctly Coleridgean, are full of fantasy and horror and a love of ancient "lore." "Frost at Midnight" stands in stark contrast to such poems, and is all the richer for it. Although Coleridge was capable of weaving together incredibly imaginative stories, here he sticks to everyday images and his humble, tender love for his child.
"Frost at Midnight" has gone on to influence poets in many ways. In terms of the way it incorporates autobiographical details, its echoes can be seen in the work of so-called confessional poets in the 20th century, like Robert Lowell ("For the union Dead"). In the way that it attempts to weave together sights from the ordinary world with speculation about the nature of reality, the poems of Wallace Stevens ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird"), Elizabeth Bishop ("The Fish)", and John Ashbery are obvious descendants. Although Coleridge may have felt overshadowed by Wordsworth, his influence has been felt for a long time.
Historical Context
Coleridge grew up in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing England, a process that was often dirty, bleak, and unjust. He attended boarding school on a scholarship in London, which seems to have cemented his ambivalence about cities. His emphasis on nature can be seen in part as a reaction to the brutishness of industrialization as he experienced it.
Coleridge, like Wordsworth and many of their friends, was also a political radical as a young man. The French Revolution coincided with his young adulthood and inspired him. Thoroughly middle-class, Coleridge had no link to the aristocracy. He was, however, profoundly religious, and together with like-minded friends developed a scheme to establish a small settlement in American based around religious communism. They called Pantisocracy; it never materialized. All the same, Coleridge's attitude towards nature and religion in "Frost at Midnight" can be seen as bound up in his politics, a sense that nature provides an egalitarian environment where people can become closer to God.
In turn, this politics is a distinct outgrowth of its time. Radical French politics, which inspired Coleridge and others, resulted from the rise of bourgeoisie, or business-owning class, as they displaced the old aristocracy. This rise happened in England as well as France. One consequence of this was that literature no longer had to appeal to aristocrats alone. Poets could address the everyday experiences of common folk. Art was part of the revolution.
Additionally, the success of the empirical sciences throughout the 1700s meant that people looked on the physical world with new interest. Suddenly it seemed that all events could be explained by science. People began to look to nature and science, rather religion, for explanations. Everyday experience seemed to trump religious ecstasy.
For Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, this was an opportunity and a challenge. They set out to write poetry that could combine a radical emphasis on common people's experiences, first-hand observations of nature, and a deep sense of spirituality. The result was the beginning of English Romanticism.
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More “Frost at Midnight” Resources
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External Resources
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Pantisocracy — An essay on Pantisocracy, the religious-communistic utopia that Coleridge and his friends had hoped to found.
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A Movie Star Reads the Poem — Hear Richard Burton read "Frost at Midnight."
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A Biography of Coleridge — A detailed biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Poetry Foundation.
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Coleridge Cottage — The cottage where Coleridge wrote "Frost at Midnight" is in the southwest of England, where it is preserved by the National Trust. Their website has photos and historical information.
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More on "Frost at Midnight" — An article of "Frost at Midnight" from the Poetry Foundation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Samuel Coleridge
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