Work record

Frost at Midnight

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1798 · 18th Century · Poetry · English

Public domainGreat Poems & Speeches · Poem Read full text Download EPUB Five-minute digest

Abstract

Written: February 1798; published 1798; revised 1817 and 1834
Setting: A winter night in 1798, recalling the 1780s; Coleridge's cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, England
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Country: Kingdom of Great Britain (United Kingdom)
Language: English
Genre: Conversation poem (meditative lyric)
Form: Seventy-four lines of blank verse in four verse paragraphs
Recommended: Grades 9–12 (Blank verse meditation; clean.)

Background. During his year of close friendship with Wordsworth in the Quantocks, Coleridge composed several informal reflective poems. This one, set beside his first son's cradle, was printed in a slim pamphlet of political and personal verse.

Content. Alone and awake, the poet notices the deep hush of a freezing night, broken only by an owl and a quivering flake of soot. It recalls his lonely London boyhood, when he dreamed of his birthplace and longed for visitors. He resolves that his baby will grow up in open country, reading the visible speech in which the Creator reveals himself, so that every season, even the icicles of winter, will delight him.

Form. Unrhymed lines move from description into memory and prophecy before circling back to the frost.

Themes. Childhood, fatherhood, memory and the education of a soul by God through creation are bound together; the poem's natural theology is explicitly theistic.

Reception. Five months later Wordsworth's lines above Tintern Abbey borrowed this pattern of a present scene, remembered past and blessing on a companion. Critics now see the piece as the purest example of the conversational meditation that both friends developed, and Hartley Coleridge did grow up among the Lakes.

For students. Pair with Psalm 19 and with Tintern Abbey, which this poem influenced.

Main characters

The speaker: Wakeful father by the fire
The babe: His sleeping infant son Hartley

Summary

Frost at Midnight is a meditation in blank verse that Coleridge wrote in February 1798 at his cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, and published that year in a pamphlet with Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode. It is the finest of his conversation poems, quiet poems that speak as if to a companion and move from a present scene into memory and back. Late at night, while the household sleeps, the speaker sits by a low fire beside the cradle of his infant son Hartley. Outside, the frost performs its secret ministry, unhelped by any wind; the owlet cries; the silence is so deep it disturbs him. The only moving thing is a film of soot fluttering on the grate, which country people called a stranger and believed foretold the arrival of an absent friend. The film reminds him of his schooldays in London, when he would gaze at such a stranger on the school grate, dream of his birthplace and its church bells, and hope that the door would open on a visiting townsman, aunt or sister. He was reared in the great city, pent among dim cloisters, and saw nothing lovely but the sky and stars. Turning to the sleeping baby, he promises a different childhood: Hartley will wander like a breeze by lakes, sandy shores, crags and clouds, and so see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds of that eternal language which God utters, who from eternity teaches himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher, he shall mould the child's spirit. Therefore all seasons will be sweet to him, whether summer or winter, when the eave-drops fall or the secret ministry of frost hangs them up in silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon. The poem ends where it began, with the frost, now seen as part of God's teaching.

Virtues in this work

Piety: The poem names God as the great universal Teacher who speaks through creation.
Charity: A father's loving blessing on his infant son shapes the whole poem.

Plot or Argument

Lines 1-23: the silent night
The frost, the owlet, the sleeping household and the fluttering film on the grate.
Lines 23-43: memories of school
The film recalls the boy at school watching the grate and dreaming of home and of a visitor.
Lines 44-64: the promise to the child
He vows that his son will grow up among lakes and mountains and learn God's eternal language in nature.
Lines 65-74: all seasons sweet
Every season will be sweet to the child, ending with icicles shining to the moon.

Characters

The speaker, father
Coleridge, awake late beside his son's cradle.
The babe, son
His infant son Hartley, asleep in the cradle.

Lessons

Nature as God's language
The father hopes his son will learn the eternal language which God utters in creation. Nature is a school with God as teacher.
- What does the speaker mean by an eternal language?
- How does Psalm 19 describe creation speaking?
- Is nature enough to teach us about God?
Related across the library
- The Nature of the Physical World, Lesson: What physics measures
  What physics measures. Eddington's two tables and his chapter on pointer readings argue that physics describes the measurable structure of things, not what they are in themselves. This does not make science false; it marks its boundary. The lesson is to distinguish what a method can know from what it cannot.
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Lesson: What is the presence in nature?
  What is the presence in nature?. The speaker feels a presence, a motion and a spirit that rolls through all things, and calls nature the guardian of his moral being. Readers have long asked whether this describes the Creator known through creation or a spirit within nature itself; the poem keeps its language deliberately open.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter IV
  those who are happiest are those who do the most for others. The lesson he drew from the unselfishness of his Hampton teachers.
- Christ Legends, Lesson: Saving yourself alone
  Saving yourself alone. In Our Lord and Saint Peter, Peter's mother could have been lifted to Paradise with others clinging to her, but she pushes them all away and falls. The legend teaches that a selfish heart cannot rise.
- A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Lesson: Order in nature as a language
  Order in nature as a language. For Berkeley the regular sequence of sensations, the laws of nature, shows the wisdom of the Spirit who produces them, and science learns to read those regularities as signs. Nature becomes something like speech addressed to finite minds. This turns natural philosophy into a form of attention to God's steady habits of acting.
A father's hope
The poem is a blessing on a child. The father wants to give his son what he lacked.
- What did the speaker lack as a boy?
- What does he hope for Hartley?
- What do good parents want for their children?
Related across the library
- The Story of My Life, Lesson: Every struggle is a victory
  Every struggle is a victory. Learning to speak, preparing for Radcliffe, and studying with books that were not in braille all took Helen enormous effort. In Chapter XX she says she slips back and falls but keeps climbing. She treats hard work as part of the climb rather than a reason to stop.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II
  Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance Mill explains why people who start with high ideals often sink into lower pleasures: not by choice but because circumstances starve their higher capacities.
- This Side of Paradise, Lesson: Faith remembered
  Faith remembered. Amory is not a practising Catholic, yet Darcy's Catholicism is the only code he half keeps, and he flees in terror from what he takes to be evil. The novel records a young man drifting from faith while still haunted by it.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter XX
  Every struggle is a victory. Describing her climb up the Hill Difficulty of college study.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter VII
  Agnes in the bluish sphere loses all sense of time and is nursed and fed by the wise woman each night while she sleeps.
Circular form
The poem returns at the end to the frost of the opening, now transformed.
- How has the frost changed in meaning by the end?
- Why end with the moon and icicles?
Related across the library
- Poems, in Two Volumes, Lesson: Childhood and immortality
  Childhood and immortality. The Ode says we come from God trailing clouds of glory, and the light fades as we grow.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Lesson: Faith in time of plague
  Faith in time of plague. Harper treats religious responses as part of the story: Cyprian's sermons on mortality, Christian care for the sick, and the apocalyptic hopes of the sixth and seventh centuries. Plague and disaster pressed people of every faith to ask what suffering meant and what they owed one another.
- Antony and Cleopatra, Full Text
  too short of that great property Which still should go with Antony DEMETRIUS I am full sorry That he approves the common liar who Thus speaks of him at Rome but I will hope Of better deeds tomorrow Rest you happy Exeunt SCENE II Alexandria Another Room in Cleopatra s palace Enter Enobarbus a Soothsayer Charmian Iras Mardian and Alexas CHARMIAN Lord Alexas sweet Alexas most anything Alexas almost most absolute Alexas where s the soothsayer that you praised so to th queen O that I knew this husband which you say m...
- Waiting for Godot, Lesson: Friendship in a bare world
  Friendship in a bare world. Didi and Gogo bicker, threaten to part and cannot do without each other. Vladimir covers Estragon with his coat while he sleeps and comforts him after his nightmares. In a play with almost no consolations, their companionship is real.
- On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Lesson: Recovering the ancients to go beyond them
  Recovering the ancients to go beyond them. Copernicus searched Cicero, Plutarch and other ancient writers for anyone who had moved the earth, and found Philolaus, Heraclides and Ecphantus. Like many Renaissance scholars he presented his innovation as the recovery of an older wisdom, and then worked it out with mathematical care no ancient had given it.

Context

Coleridge lived at Nether Stowey near Wordsworth in 1797-98, the most creative year of his life. His son Hartley was born in 1796. Coleridge's own schooling at Christ's Hospital in London had been lonely.

Composition

Written February 1798 and published in a quarto pamphlet with Fears in Solitude that year; revised for Sibylline Leaves (1817). The text here is the 1834 version in E. H. Coleridge's edition.

Reception

It became the model of the Romantic conversation poem and influenced Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, written five months later.

Nature / Landscape Childhood Family Faith / Religion Memory / Time Education

Comparisons

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth's blank-verse meditation that ends by blessing his sister, written five months later under Coleridge's influence.
Kubla Khan
Coleridge's visionary fragment from the same months, wild where this poem is still.
God's Grandeur
Hopkins also hears God speaking through the natural world.

Quotes

Frequently cited

“The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight, Lines 1-2 (Gutenberg #29090: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912)).Quote card

Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, The First Epistle Of Clement To The Corinthians
exceedingly and his countenance fell And God said unto Cain Wherefore art thou very sorrowful and wherefore did thy countenance fall If thou hast offered aright and hast not divided aright didst thou not sin Hold thy peace Unto thee shall he turn and thou shalt rule over him And Cain said unto Abel his brother Let us go over unto the plain And it came to pass while they Were in the plain that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him Ye see brethren jealousy and envy wrought a brother's murder By reason...
A Child's Garden of Verses, Medical lens
Stevensons illness shadows indoor days and regulated rest; useful historically without clinicalizing the poems.
The Koran, Medical lens
The Quran is not a medical text, but several passages shaped medicine and public health in Islamic societies. Honey is described as containing healing for people, a verse central to later 'Prophetic medicine'. Wine and gambling are said to contain great sin and some benefit, with sin outweighing benefit, and later verses forbid them, the basis of Islamic prohibition of intoxicants. The sick and travellers are exempted from fasting in Ramadan. The stages of the embryo's development from a drop to a clot to a lump...
Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Death of Cuchulain
he tied himself to it with his breast-belt, the way he would not meet his death lying down, but would meet it standing up. Mortally wounded, Cuchulain goes to a pillar-stone west of the lake and binds himself to it to face his enemies.
The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto III
All hope abandon, ye who enter in Dante reads the last line of the gate’s inscription as he and Virgil enter Hell.

Frequently cited

“Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight, Lines 60-62 (Gutenberg #29090: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912)).Quote card

Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, ch. 21, sec. 5
By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation Calvin's definition of predestination, after distinguishing it from God's foreknowledge.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Full Text
a sunny wall and tasted some of them and got as many apples to eat as I wished On another memorable walk in a hay-field when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp prickly stinging cry and jumping up eagerly called grandfather s attention to it He said he heard only the wind but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats This to me was a wonderful di...
The Imitation of Christ, Book 1, Chapter I: Of the imitation of Christ, and of contempt of the world and all its vanities
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, save to love God, and Him only to serve. Book I, chapter 1: the opening chapter turns Ecclesiastes into a rule of life.
The Nature of the Physical World, Lesson: What physics measures
What physics measures. Eddington's two tables and his chapter on pointer readings argue that physics describes the measurable structure of things, not what they are in themselves. This does not make science false; it marks its boundary. The lesson is to distinguish what a method can know from what it cannot.
Little Dorrit, Book the Second, Ch. 21 ('The History of a Self-Tormentor')
I have the misfortune of not being a fool The first line of Miss Wade's written history, in which she reads every kindness as an insult.

“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight, Line 65 (Gutenberg #29090: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912)).Quote card

The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter IV
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. The opening of the chapter that tells of March 3, 1887.
Discourse on Method, Part I
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess The ironic opening, which grounds the method on the equal natural capacity of all to reason.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, FIRST JOINT DEBATE, AT OTTAWA,
in the States and not in Congress the power to legislate for the extradition of fugitives from labor to repeal and entirely abrogate the Fugitive Slave law to restrict slavery to those States in which it exists to prohibit the admission of any more slave States into the Union to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia to exclude slavery from all the Territories over which the General Government has exclusive jurisdiction and to resist the acquirements of any more Territories unless the practice of slavery th...
Selected Sermons, Lesson: Delivery changes doctrine's force
Delivery changes doctrine's force. Whitefield shows that the same teaching can become a mass event through voice, timing, and presence. Performance is not separate from persuasion.
Opticks, Full Text
considered Illustration FIG Suppose therefore that RS in Fig represents the Surface of stagnating Water and that C is the point of Incidence in which any Ray coming in the Air from A in the Line AC is reflected or refracted and I would know whither this Ray shall go after Reflexion or Refraction I erect upon the Surface of the Water from the point of Incidence the Perpendicular CP and produce it downwards to Q and conclude by the first Axiom that the Ray after Reflexion and Refraction shall be found somewhere in...

“Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight, Line 74 (Gutenberg #29090: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912)).Quote card

The Burgess Bird Book for Children, Full Text
needn't try to tease me by pretending that there is My dear I know you you are just as tickled to be back here as I am He sings as if he were said Peter for all the time Mr Wren was singing with all his might Jenny Wren looked over at Mr Wren fondly Isn't he a dear to sing to me like that And isn't it a perfectly beautiful spring song said she Then without waiting for Peter to reply her tongue rattled on I do wish he would be careful Sometimes I am afraid he will overdo Just look at him now He is singing so hard...
A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part II, Sect. 5 (Of our esteem for the rich and powerful)
the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each others emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated Hume's image for sympathy, explaining how the pleasure of a rich man is reflected in observers and returned to him.
The Brothers Karamazov, Part I
did not go away and Fyodor Pavlovitch promised them a small sum for wages and paid it regularly Grigory knew too that he had an indisputable influence over his master It was true and he was aware of it Fyodor Pavlovitch was an obstinate and cunning buffoon yet though his will was strong enough in some of the affairs of life as he expressed it he found himself to his surprise extremely feeble in facing certain other emergencies He knew his weaknesses and was afraid of them There are positions in which one has to...
The Swiss Family Robinson, Source
orphan home--Display our treasures--A sumptuous supper--Ernest's penguin--Champagne turned to vinegar--A fight with jackals--A curious sentinel--A visit to the wreck--We rig our craft--Stow a cargo--Sleep on board--Floats for our herd--We embark--Encounter a shark--Land--Relate our adventures CHAPTER III The mother relates her adventures--Proposes that we should build a nest--How Jack treated the jackal skin--How the boys were surprised by a bustard--How they found the mangrove tree--How the dogs caught the crab...
Jewish Antiquities, Footnotes:
CHAPTER How Moses Made War With The Ethiopians CHAPTER How Moses Fled Out Of Egypt Into Midian CHAPTER Concerning The Burning Bush And The Rod Of Moses CHAPTER How Moses And Aaron Returned Into Egypt To Pharaoh CHAPTER Concerning The Ten Plagues Which Came Upon The Egyptians CHAPTER How The Hebrews Under The Conduct Of Moses Left Egypt CHAPTER How The Sea Was Divided Asunder For The Hebrews When They Were Pursued By The Egyptians And So Gave Them An Opportunity Of Escaping From Them FOOTNOTES BOOK III Containing...

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The silence and the single moving thing, the film on the grate.
The jump from the present night to memories of school.
The turn to the cradle and the word thou.
The language of God as teacher.
The return to the frost at the end.

Key terms and names

Conversation poem: Coleridge's informal blank-verse poems addressed to a present companion.
Stranger: A film of soot on the grate, believed to foretell a visitor.
Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Ministry: Service; the frost's quiet work.
Natural theology: Knowledge of God drawn from creation.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What is the time and setting of the poem?
Comprehension What does the film on the grate remind the speaker of?
Comprehension What future does he promise his son?
Interpretation How does the speaker's childhood differ from the one he hopes for Hartley?
Interpretation What does Coleridge mean by God's eternal language?
Interpretation How has the meaning of the frost changed by the end?
Big Question Can nature teach a child to know God?

Faith Connections

Psalm 19:1-4 (Scripture)
The heavens declare the glory of God; day unto day utters speech: Coleridge's eternal language.
Romans 1:20 (Scripture)
God's invisible attributes are clearly seen in the things that are made.
Job 38:22, 29-30 (Scripture)
God asks Job about the treasuries of snow and the hoary frost of heaven: the frost's secret ministry is his.
Augustine, Confessions X.6 (Great Conversation)
Augustine questions the earth and sky, which answer that God made them.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The speaker's own city childhood gave him little of nature; his son will grow up among lakes and mountains; there God teaches through creation; therefore every season will be sweet and instructive to the child.

Rhetorical device: circular structure. The poem opens and closes with the secret ministry of frost.

Debate: Resolved: that a child raised in the country is better taught than one raised in the city.

Memory Work

Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Lines 60-62. A compact statement of God teaching through creation.

The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.
Lines 1-2. The quiet, memorable opening.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain how memory, present scene and hope for the future are woven together in Frost at Midnight.

Comparison with Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: Compare the blessings at the end of Frost at Midnight and Tintern Abbey: what does each poet hope nature will do?

Creative Prompts

Classroom
Mark the four movements of the poem and give each a title.
Essay
Is Coleridge's natural theology in Frost at Midnight Christian? Compare Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19.
Poetry
Write a blank-verse blessing for a younger brother, sister or child you know.