`Frost at Midnight` by Samuel Coleridge

Frost at Midnight : Coleridge 's Romanticism

`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 . Coleridge dwells upon the effect of the beauty of nature on poetic imagination , the kinship of nature and

br 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 will attempt to analyze and understand these Romantic beliefs of Coleridge as expressed in the `Frost at Midnight

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

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

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 . That the poet imposes his own subjectivity and feelings on this fluttering flame is a typically romantic attitude . We find such personal interpretation of nature also in other romantics , for instance , in

. B . Shelley 's poems like To a Skylark or Ode to the West Wind or Wordsworth 's Daffodils . The `idling spirit ' of the poet , carried away by the power of its own passion everywhere finds an echo or mirror seeking of itself / and makes a toy of thought

In the second part of the poem , the poet 's mind walks back in time to find himself again in the great city , pent `mid cloisters dim ' where he spent his miserable childhood cut off from the nourishing force of life-giving nature . The poet recalls how in his childhood he had sought similar sympathy in the fluttering flam...