S. T. Coleridge’ s Frost at Midnight: Structure and Ideas
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight epitomizes the change that gradually occured in English poetry and world-view after the Augustan Age. The Augustan poets strove to express what is universal in man, the Nature of man as it was thought to have always existed. This often resulted in the writing of vague social poetry. The Romantic poem Frost at Midnight, on the other hand, emphasizes the uniqueness and concreteness of the individual experience. The speaker of the poem can almost be identified with the poet himself, making the poem a personal, nearly confessional, utterance. Although when writing the poem in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was still under the influence of the empirical, and hence anti-idealistic and anti-Romantic, associationism of John Locke and David Hartley – evident in the poem’s structure, the poet managed, more or less consciously, to incorporate into the poem many traits of the Romantic Weltanschauung. Alongside the stress on individual experience, we can observe the Romantic divinization of nature, alienation from and disgust with urban existence, mention of folklore and local custom, cognition by illumination and introspection and, last but not least, the optimistic belief i
The imagination, or secondary imagination as Coleridge would put it, interpreted, ordered and recreated by fusion, chaotic sense data. For the Romantic poets imagination was the most important faculty of the mind. The idealist William Blake perceived the world of the imagination as the ultimate reality, obscured, since man’s fall from Grace, by the enslaving corporeality of the five senses. Coleridge was less extreme in his praise of the imagination, yet acknowledges its grave creative importance: a Romantic poet in spe, especially in a country where Robinson Crusoe, the first novel to glorify the bourgeois values of entrepreneurial initiative while reducing the aesthetic and hedonistic aspects of existence, had been written. There are many instances of powerful aesthetic experiences in the poem. In the second stanza, we learn from the speaker’ s reminiscence that already in his youth he was able to intensely feel art and beauty, even in such simple events as “the bells in the old church tower with their poor man’s music” (l. 28-29) that “stirred and haunted him with a wild pleasure” (l. 31-32). Another instance is when the speaker, an adult now, looks at his child and is overcome with awe and emotions: The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Only that film that fluttered on the grate,
Some topics in this essay:
Frost Midnight,
Robinson Crusoe,
Weltanschauung Alongside,
William Blake,
David Hartley,
God Utters,
John Locke,
God Coleridge,
Taylor Coleridge,
Eden Living,
frost midnight,
individual experience,
phenomenological field,
john locke,
samuel taylor,
samuel taylor coleridge,
associated speaker’s,
powerful imagination,
divinization nature,
sensory stimuli,
taylor coleridge,
poem frost midnight,
speaker’s phenomenological field,
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Approximate Word count = 1594
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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