Frost at Midnight

“Frost at Midnight” is a poem about reflection. Just as Coleridge’s frosted windowpane would reflect the lighted cottage’s interior more vividly than it would display the dark exterior, his observations about the outside world ultimately reflect his inner life and concerns. His thought focuses on the different ways things reflect one another, from the owlet’s echoed cry to how children grow up to reflect their environments. The most prominent mode of reflection in “Frost at Midnight,” however, relates to the act of mental reflection and its role in understanding the world.

Coleridge’s long reflection begins with the world outside his cottage. He notes the “[f]rost” (Line 1) and an “owlet’s cry” (Line 2), which comes “loud—and hark, again!” (Line 3). The immediate repetition of the owlet’s cry in Coleridge’s silent outdoor scene suggests that the second call is actually an echo. His insistence that the second cry is “loud as before” (Line 3) reinforces this idea. Since he does not distinguish between the cries as separate events, the phrase “again! Loud as before” (Line 3) implies a repetition of the same cry reflected. The echo’s ability to maintain its volume underlines the stagnant air and “extreme silentness” (Line 10) Coleridge experiences.

This quietude drives him inward, but the “calm” (Line 8) he experiences “vexes meditation” (Line 9) and instead draws his attention to the “film” (Line 15), or “fluttering stranger” (Line 27), which is the only moving object in his perception. “Stranger” is an antiquated term for a mobile piece of ash that flutters on a fireplace’s grate as the hot air rises (See: Symbols & Motifs). Seeing this piece of ash makes Coleridge consider his childhood, when he saw the same phenomena “at school” (Line 26). He argues that the ash’s “motion in this hush of nature” (Line 17) makes it a “companionable form” (Line 19) to the living. Instead of an object understood for its own qualities, the ash’s movement makes it into evidence of an “[e]cho or mirror seeking of itself” (Line 22). This “[e]cho or mirror” (Line 22) proves Coleridge’s human desire to find himself—his “idling Spirit” (Line 20)—in the external world, even in a small piece of ash. In this way, his connection with the piece of ash points toward how his present informs and reflects his past, and vice versa.

Coleridge’s childhood experience being educated in the city (See: Themes) similarly reflects his opinions about nature. The emphasis he places on his child “learn[ing] far other lore, / [a]nd in far other scenes” (Line 51-52) from the “great city” (Line 53) underlines his concern with his child repeating or echoing his own shortcomings. Instead, he suggests the child shall “wander like a breeze / [b]y lakes and sandy shores” (Lines 55-56). This simile—a direct comparison between two things, typically using “like” or “as”—comparing the child to a “breeze” (Line 55) works with the earlier attention to the child’s “gentle breathings” (Line 46) to disrupt the poem’s otherwise stagnant air, “[u]nhelped by any wind” (Line 2). The connection between the child and air also connects the “babe so beautiful” (Line 49) with the owlet’s repeated cries in the first stanza. The child and the bird reflect each other not only through their young age but also through their ability to be “heard in this deep calm” (Line 46).

Coleridge’s association between the owlet and his child is one example of how the natural world fuels his imagination. With these metaphorical associations, he is better able to reflect both on the world around him and on his current position. This metaphorical value is best articulated in the poem’s puns on “[f]rost” (Line 1). The word “frost,” which Coleridge capitalizes in the first line for emphasis, has a Middle English counterpart in the word “rime.” The use of “rime,” which is a homophone for “rhyme” (meaning the two words sound the same), gained popularity among poets of the Romantic era to pun between poetry and cold locales. Perhaps the most famous example of this association is Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” published the same year as “Frost at Midnight.” Like poetry, the poem’s “[f]rost”—its rhyme—is a catalyst for reflection and creates complex patterns in “its secret ministry” (Line 1).

The connection between poetry and frost works to naturalize poetry while attributing cultural complexity to natural phenomena. This ability to see human intention reflected in nature is the same that drives Coleridge to call the dancing ash a “companionable form” (Line 19). His belief in a “[g]reat universal [t]eacher” (Line 64), the Christian God, who expresses himself through the “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / [o]f that eternal language” (Lines 60-61) of nature, underlies these convictions in how nature reflects divine rule. Coleridge argues that God teaches “[h]imself in all, and all things in himself” (Line 63), suggesting that God reflects himself through nature as a way of revealing himself to humanity.

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is a meditation on the role of reflection in human lives. Though humanity is prone to draw connections through natural metaphors that make the natural world more “companionable” (Line 19), Coleridge as speaker suggests that this practice is also part of a larger, divine purpose, one that can be found in “the secret ministry of frost” (Line 73), which, being part of nature, makes it an agent or minister of God himself. Like many poets of the Romantic era, Coleridge troubles the boundaries between humanity and nature to demonstrate how people reflect their environment and can find themselves spiritually within that reflection.