What Sound Can Do: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight"

While “Frost at Midnight” finds Coleridge engaging in a remarkable degree of imagery, I found myself most drawn to its sound and meter that is both directly discussed by the speaker and bolstered by the play of lines.

After our introduction to the “secret ministry” of frost, we arrive at “the owlet’s cry” which “Came loud – and hark, again! loud as before” (2-3). Coleridge, in the first three lines of his poem, sets up a dichotomy that concerns his speaker throughout the poem: the absence of sound and sound itself. The two often become entangled throughout later lines – it is unclear when silence is “strange” or disturbing and when it is reassuring, an utterance of God. It seems as though the poem also scans the stressed syllables in spondees clustering around the “loud” sections – the owl’s hoot “came loud” and is followed by a “hark again,” versus a gentler iambic pentameter matching the quiet moments.

I am unsure when the speaker mentions a calmness that “disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness” (8-10) if he means the peaceful slumbering of the infant. I’m tempted to say that this strange, extreme silentness is the general solitude of the speaker alone in the cottage where all else are at rest. Following on the lines of iambs vs. spondees, these lines seem to scan more along the lines of the “secret ministry” of frost. This leads into the “populous village,” where the “numberless goings on of life,” are as “Inaudible as dreams!” The speaker finds himself, in silent solitude before the frost’s performance, separated from the sea, hill, and wood – and yet, there’s an inaudibility, or absence of sound, there in the village too. Maybe this means that the speaker’s solitude prevents him from engaging in the village’s audibility – he is not part of the “goings on” there. Perhaps it means, instead, that his solitude is just as empty as those daily events, which are inaudible like dreams. However, considering the positive attributes given to dreams later in the poem, it seems like the silence in terms of the “sea, hill and wood,” is not disturbing and does not “vex meditation” (10-14).

The film among former flame, the “sole unquiet thing,” provides the speaker with “dim sympathies” (16 and 18). It provides a peak into the “hush of nature.” The “unquiet thing” reminds the speaker of “the poor man’s only music” – church bells from his childhood. Again, “old church-town” and “poor man’s only music” features a spondaic meter that contrasts with the “sole unquiet thing” of the film “which fluttered on the grate.” This metrical difference seems to contrast the two images that are, for the speaker, metonymically linked. The meter allows us to hold these two images separate from one another while they speak across the lines to each other.

Ultimately it is what is heard that the poem is concerned with, even if the thing that makes noise does so quietly. The “gentle breathings” of the child are “heard in this deep calm” (45). The child’s sleep becomes like the church bells with its “articulate sounds of things to come” (33). The speaker still emphasizes the visual – it is what the babe shall “see and hear / The lovely shapes and sound intelligible” that matter, but it is not seen in God, but is instead God who “utters” and thus “mould[s] / Thy spirit.”

The poem fades back into a silence by its end, looping around to the frost that quietly entered into the poem at the start. The middle of the stanza builds into spondees – the redbreast very audibly sings “while the nigh thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall” (67, 69-70). But then we settle into quiet, these things “Heard only in the trances of the blast” (71) or in frost, with its “silent icicles / Quietly shining to the quiet moon.” Perhaps this fade into quiet, indicated by unstressed syllables strung together, is indicative of the ultimate silence – death – also an untimely solitude. The speaker finds himself comforted by that which makes noise even in its quiet – the child – but, by the end, finds the moon and the icicles – both cold images – silently hanging over the world.