"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.