Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized
poetry’s capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. Nearly all of
Coleridge’s poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close
observation, great attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly
demonstrate Coleridge’s respect and delight. Some poems, such as “This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Youth and Age” (1834), and
“Frost at Midnight,” mourn the speakers’ physical isolation from the outside
world. Others, including “The Eolian Harp,” use images of nature to explore
philosophical and analytical ideas. Still other poems, including “The
Nightingale” (ca. 1798), simply praise nature’s beauty.
Even poems that don’t directly deal with nature, including “Kubla Khan” and
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” derive some symbols and images from nature.
Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded against the pathetic fallacy, or the
attribution of human feeling to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature
contained an innate, constant joyousness wholly separate from the ups and downs
of human experience.
Coleridge
through his experience with nature become almost painfully human. Wordsworth
and Coleridge realize that no matter how strong the poet's connection with nature, he is still separate from
it.
Nature has made Coleridge
in his dejection, feels his separation as a human from nature:
I see, not feel, how beautiful [the stars] are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?(ll. 38-41)
The two men revere nature
and know they are essential to its beauty, because they must appreciate it for
the beauty to exist. However, they are still separate from it; they are human.
These two poets use a technique that departs completely from the Neoclassical
tradition where the emphasis was placed on order and balance and reasoned
thoughts, even in form. Coleridge and Wordsworth take the liberty to write in
blank verse, often without punctuation between lines, underlining the Romantic
ideal of emotion. Expression of emotion does not necessarily end at the last
syllable of a heroic couplet, but Reason invariably did.
Further, Coleridge's poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes
for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult's
reconnection with nature through memories of childhood; in poems such as
"Frost at Midnight," Coleridge indicates the fragility of the child's
innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as "Dejection:
An Ode" and "Nightingale," he stresses the division between his
own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally, Coleridge often
privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic
simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the "thousand thousand slimy
things" that crawl upon the rotting sea in the "Rime" would be
out of place in a Wordsworth poem. . The mind, to Coleridge, cannot take its
feeling from nature and cannot falsely imbue nature with its own feeling; rather,
the mind must be so suffused with its own joy that it opens up to the real,
independent, "immortal" joy of nature.
1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge
The Frost performs its secret
ministry,
Unhelped by any
wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud, -and
hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my
cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that
solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings:
save that at my side
My cradled infant
slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so
calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation
with its strange
And extreme
silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
With all the
numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams!
the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt
fire, and quivers not;
Only that film,
which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters
there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion
in this hush of nature
Gives it dim
sympathies with me who live,
Making it a
companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and
freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods
interprets, every where
Echo or mirror
seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of
Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To
watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear
Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore
all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
2)
http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Frost_at_Midnight.html
As the frost "performs its
secret ministry" in the windless night, an owlet's cry twice pierces the
silence. The "inmates" of the speaker's cottage are all asleep, and
the speaker sits alone, solitary except for the "cradled infant"
sleeping by his side. The calm is so total that the silence becomes
distracting, and all the world of "sea, hill, and wood, / This populous
village!" seems "inaudible as dreams." The thin blue flame of
the fire burns without flickering; only the film on the grate flutters, which
makes it seem "companionable" to the speaker, almost alive--stirred
by "the idling Spirit."
"But O!" the speaker
declares; as a child he often watched "that fluttering stranger" on
the bars of his school window and daydreamed about his birthplace and the
church tower whose bells rang so sweetly on Fair-day. These things lured him to
sleep in his childhood, and he brooded on them at school, only pretending to
look at his books--unless, of course, the door opened, in which case he looked
up eagerly, hoping to see "Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, / My
play-mate when we both were clothed alike!"
Addressing the "Dear Babe,
that sleep[s] cradled" by his side, whose breath fills the silences in his
thought, the speaker says that it thrills his heart to look at his beautiful
child. He enjoys the thought that although he himself was raised in the
"great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim," his child will wander in the
rural countryside, by lakes and shores and mountains, and his spirit shall be
molded by God, who will "by giving make it [the child] ask."
All seasons, the speaker
proclaims, shall be sweet to his child, whether the summer makes the earth
green or the robin redbreast sings between tufts of snow on the branch; whether
the storm makes "the eave-drops fall" or the frost's "secret
ministry" hangs icicles silently, "quietly shining to the quiet
Moon."
3) http://www.eliteskills.com/c/4689
Like many Romantic verse
monologues of this kind (Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is a notable
example), "Frost at Midnight" is written in blank verse, a term used
to describe unrhymed lines metered in iambic pentameter.
The speaker of "Frost at
Midnight" is generally held to be Coleridge himself, and the poem is a
quiet, very personal restatement of the abiding themes of early English
Romanticism: the effect of nature on the imagination (nature is the Teacher
that "by giving" to the child's spirit also makes it
"ask"); the relationship between children and the natural world
("thou, my babe! shall wander like a breeze..."); the contrast
between this liberating country setting and city ("I was reared / In the
great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim"); and the relationship between
adulthood and childhood as they are linked in adult memory.
However, while the poem conforms
to many of the guiding principles of Romanticism, it also highlights a key
difference between Coleridge and his fellow Romantics, specifically Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, raised in the rustic countryside, saw his own childhood as a time
when his connection with the natural world was at its greatest; he revisited
his memories of childhood in order to soothe his feelings and provoke his
imagination. Coleridge, on the other hand, was raised in London, "pent
'mid cloisters dim," and questions Wordsworth's easy identification of
childhood with a kind of automatic, original happiness; instead, in this poem
he says that, as a child, he "saw naught lovely but the stars and
sky" and seems to feel the lingering effects of that alienation. In this
poem, we see how the pain of this alienation has strengthened Coleridge's wish
that his child enjoy an idyllic Wordsworthian upbringing "by lakes and sandy
shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the
clouds..." Rather than seeing the link between childhood and nature as an
inevitable, Coleridge seems to perceive it as a fragile, precious, and
extraordinary connection, one of which he himself was deprived.
In expressing its central themes,
"Frost at Midnight" relies on a highly personal idiom whereby the
reader follows the natural progression of the speaker's mind as he sits up late
one winter night thinking. His idle observation gives the reader a quick
impression of the scene, from the "silent ministry" of the frost to
the cry of the owl and the sleeping child. Coleridge uses language that
indicates the immediacy of the scene to draw in the reader; for instance, the
speaker cries "Hark!" upon hearing the owl, as though he were
surprised by its call. The objects surrounding the speaker become metaphors for
the work of the mind and the imagination, so that the fluttering film on the
fire grate plunges him into the recollection of his childhood. His memory of
feeling trapped in the schoolhouse naturally brings him back into his immediate
surroundings with a surge of love and sympathy for his son. His final
meditation on his son's future becomes mingled with his Romantic interpretation
of nature and its role in the child's imagination, and his consideration of the
objects of nature brings him back to the frost and the icicles, which, forming
and shining in silence, mirror the silent way in which the world works upon the
mind; this revisitation of winter's frosty forms brings the poem full circle.