Most people who care about poetry, hearing the name Samuel Taylor Coleridge, will think immediately of that wonderfully strange masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, a ‘Gothic’ tale of a vampire-like woman, or, perhaps, Kubla Khan, that “vision in a dream”, possibly induced by the poet’s growing addiction to opium, but which is, nonetheless, a perfectly finished work of art.
What TS Eliot, another, very different kind of poet, said of him has a certain harsh ring of truth. Coleridge, he wrote, “was condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life.” And yet Eliot also gave Coleridge some of the highest praise he ever bestowed on a fellow-poet, [Coleridge] “had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable ) and thenceforth was a haunted man; for anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted.”
The justness of Eliot’s judgment can hardly be denied. Coleridge had a brief but intense period of creative flourishing, lasting no more than six years, during which he, and his friend William Wordsworth collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, which contains much of the best of Wordsworth as well. And even though Wordsworth went on writing poetry throughout his long life, he too wrote most of his finest poetry during the period he was seeing Coleridge almost on a daily basis. It was one of those rare instances where two great poets brought out the best in each other, despite being in many ways temperamentally very different.
Coleridge was a troubled soul, and in his letters and especially his notebooks, both his strengths and weaknesses are extravagantly on display. Although blessed with a startlingly original imagination, and a mind that moved easily through the thickets of philosophy, theology, politics, and literature, he suffered from a life-long lack of self-worth, comparing himself unfavourably with those he felt were superior to him, most notably Wordsworth. His painful self-awareness made him oversensitive to the criticism of others, and his many weaknesses – he became dependent on opium in his 20s and never was able to free himself - meant that he left much undone that he might have accomplished, and even what he did manage to complete was often fragmentary and less than what his genius had originally promised.
At his most creative
Because of their originality, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan have tended to overshadow many of the other handful of superb poems Coleridge wrote. One of these, Frost at Midnight, has been described by Humphrey House, one of his best critics, as “one of the finest short poems in the [English] language.”
Frost at Midnight was written early in that six-year period when the poet was at his most creative, about midway between The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the first section of Christabel. But it is a very different kind of poem.
It is also, on one level, one of the most beautiful ‘seasonal’ poems in the English language. Because of Coleridge’s gift for describing the strange and the supernatural, it is often forgotten that he was also one of the finest nature poets, and in poems like Frost at Midnight, he matches Wordsworth at his best.
Much of what Coleridge wrote is autobiographical, and there is abundant evidence that Coleridge came to identify himself with his own creation, the Ancient Mariner, mysteriously cursed yet journeying on through an often deeply troubled life, until he finally reached the safe harbour of his last years.
Frost at Midnight shares with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner this ‘uncanny’ feature of his finest work and can be seen as a prophetic foreshadowing of the later course of his life.
Full of plans
In February 1798 Coleridge was living in a small, cramped cottage in the Westmoreland village of Nether Stowey. He had married Sara Fricker, whom he had met in Bristol, in 1795; he was 23 years old. The couple had originally gone to live in the village of Clevedon, just outside Bristol, but the attraction of living close to Wordsworth prompted the move to Nether Stowey in January 1797.
Coleridge married in haste and only realised later that he and his wife were quite unsuited to each other, though it must be said that anyone marrying him would have had a hard time making marriage a success. He was hopelessly impractical and chronically short of money all his life. He was demanding, needy, petulant, and his ‘hero worship’ of Wordsworth drove his wife to distraction. And his life-long addiction to opium began during these first years of marriage.
But for the first few years he loved his wife and tried to be a good husband and their first child was born in September 1796. Coleridge named him David Hartley, after a philosopher he was studying at the time.
In February 1798, he was full of plans to make money. He was writing articles for a London newspaper, he had submitted a play for production in London, which was turned down, and he was writing poetry, and regularly visiting Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy at Alfoxden, not far from Nether Stowey.
He was also writing a series of remarkable autobiographical letters to Thomas Poole, a friend of his from his Bristol days, in which he recounted his early life. And this had a direct bearing on the writing of Frost at Midnight.
Coleridge was the last but one of ten children born to the Rev John Coleridge and his wife, Anne Bowden in 1772. His early years were spent in the small Devon village of Ottery St Mary. But in October 1781, when Coleridge was nine years old, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. His death and its aftermath had a traumatic effect on the young boy.
They family was obliged to leave the vicarage to make way for the new clergyman and his family, and the family was broken up. In 1782, Coleridge was sent away to Christ’s Hospital School as a boarder. There he was to remain until 1791, when he received a scholarship to attend Jesus College, Cambridge. He left without taking his degree.
In the letters to Poole, Coleridge depicts his childhood before the death of his father, whom he loved with all the devotion of a son trying to please a busy father, as happy, and the aftermath of his death as emotionally scarring, the whole as a kind of fall from paradise into a harsher, darker world. And by 1798, having failed to take his degree, and after a succession of ill-conceived plans to become a teacher, a newspaper editor, and even a clergyman, he was regarded by his brothers as having made a mess of his life. His relationship with his mother, who seems to have been emotionally distant, never recovered from the time he was sent away to boarding school. Guilt haunted him throughout his life. It was in such circumstances that Frost at Midnight was written.
‘Its secret ministry’
We can be fairly certain when he wrote the poem. On the 19th, he sent the last of his autobiographical letters to Thomas Poole. Dorothy Wordsworth kept a journal during these years and she details the poet’s movements throughout the month. An entry for the 22nd is suggestive: “ ... the moon and two planets; sharp and frosty ... the sea very black, and making a loud noise as we came through the woods, loud as if disturbed, and the wind was silent.”
Coleridge paints the scene with beautiful simplicity –
“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.”
We begin inside the house, where the poet is sitting by a slowly dying fire, letting his mind wander where it will. Outside it is cold, but there is no wind. Stillness is one of the keynotes of the poem, a meditative stillness in which memories work their way to the surface of his mind.
Coleridge was always thinking. He sometimes felt his tendency to reflection was like a disease, killing his spontaneity. But now, while he reflects, what focuses him is his sleeping child. And as he sits by the fireside, his attention is caught by “the thin blue flame” that “lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;/only that film, which fluttered on the grate/still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing”.
And it is the fluttering “film” that opens up the poem and brings him back to his childhood and boarding school days.
In a note added many years later, Coleridge explained this bit of folklore: “In all parts of the kingdom [Britain] these films are called strangers and supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” Here, the absent ‘friend’ turns out to be his younger self, remembering his childhood. And what he recalls is the sound of the church-bells ringing in his father’s church.
There is a double movement in these lines: We have the adult poet, sitting by his sleeping child, recalling his “sweet birthplace” and then, still playing on the image of the ‘stranger’, the poet brings us into the schoolroom where he remembers hoping for a visit from one of his relations who would bring him out for the day as a treat.
For still I hoped to see the
stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt,
or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both
were clothed alike!
And now begins the second movement of the poem. From recollections of his lonely boarding school days, he is brought back to the present by the “gentle breathings” of his cradled child. Contrasting his schooldays – “For I was reared/In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,/And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars” – foresees that Hartley “shalt learn far other lore/And in far other scenes”, that he will “wander like a breeze/By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags/Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds ... 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.”
Nature, which for the Romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth, was like the visible face of the divine, will, he declares, shape his child’s soul, and make him, not a stranger in the world like his father but, at home in the great speaking cosmos, in which every season shall bring a blessing to him.
In the last few lines, we are brought back to the opening scene, to “the secret ministry of frost” and the silent icicles,
“Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”
It was not to be. Not long after completing Frost at Midnight, Coleridge went to Germany with the Wordsworths, in a sense deserting his wife. While he was gone, their second child, Berkeley – also named for a philosopher – died, and instead of hurrying home, he lingered in Germany. Apart from occasional periods, he never really lived with his family again. During brief periods of reconciliation, two more children were born – Derwent – named after a river this time! – and Sara, who grew into beautiful, intelligent and accomplished young woman who later helped edit her father’s writings. His wife went to live with her brother-in-law, the poet Robert Southey, who became something like a surrogate father to Coleridge’s children.
And what of Hartley, the son he probably loved the most? Hartley, sad to say, never amounted to anything. As brilliant as his father, he also shared his father’s weaknesses and few of his strengths. Coleridge had been enormously proud of Hartley for gained a Fellowship at Oxford, but the following year he lost it after he was found lying drunk in the street. Coleridge tried to have the decision reversed but to no avail. Afterwards, Hartley wandered aimlessly, writing poetry, trying his hand at journalism, and even teaching school.
Hartley’s later life was a constant source of anxiety to his father as he was painfully forced to acknowledge that his son was an alcoholic. When Coleridge died in 1834, Hartley did not attend his London funeral. He was eventually taken under Wordsworth’s care, and he died in 1847. He is buried next to Wordsworth.
Years earlier, when Coleridge was still hoping to complete Christabel, he added a brief poem which has nothing to do with the poem but is a beautiful and loving portrait of Hartley as a young boy.
“A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father’s eyes with light”.
