“Frost at Midnight” is, in many ways, a personal interpretation of the guiding principles of early Romanticism. Nature is idealized, given power and agency while being directly linked to personal imagination. Yet the alienation of Coleridge’s childhood distances the poem from the unbridled joy of, say, Wordsworth.
Wordsworth was born and raised in the countryside, a background that permeates all of his work. He depicts childhood as a time when connection to the world around him was at its most intimate. In “Tintern Abbey,” he mourns the loss of the “appetite: a feeling and a love” with nature as he grows older. The natural world granted him serenity and stimulated his imagination, an organic and pure happiness that is seldom seen in Coleridge’s works.
The speaker in “Frost at Midnight,” in contrast to Wordsworth’s rural upbringing, grew up “pent in cloisters dim,” able to seek refuge only in the “sky and stars.” There is no refuge in the memories of his past, no profound emotional imprints for him to call upon. The deep isolation of his early years is reflected as he addresses his child. He promises that his son will “wander like a breeze,” guaranteeing a freedom both spiritual and physical that he himself never experienced. He leaves the night he is currently surrounded by for the “leaf and stem…dappling its sunshine” and a tree with a “deep radiance,” underscoring the illumination achieved through contact with nature.
Where as Wordsworth’s youth was a sanctuary for his “fretful” adult life, Coleridge speaks of this emotional connection with wonder. He treats it as a fragile and unstable connection, one that Wordsworth speaks of as inevitable. “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure,” he says towards the end, an almost mournful recognition of a bond he was deprived of.
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