write an essay on critical appreciation of Coleridge's froast at midnight
Answers
Explanation:
The setting of the poem is late at night, when Coleridge is the only one awake in the household. Coleridge sits next to his son's cradle and reflects on the frost falling outside his home. ... Coleridge then wishes that “all seasons shall be sweet” to his son and that his son will learn to appreciate all aspects of nature.
In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge explores the relationship between environment and happiness and also reflects on the idyllic innocence of childhood. The construction of this poem, in which Coleridge’s infant son is the silent listener, is significant for Coleridge’s musings on the above themes. In “Coleridge the Revisionary: Surrogacy and Structure in the Conversation Poems,” Peter Barry highlights the “surrogacy” element that is present in many of Coleridge’s conversation poems. Barry defines surrogacy as “the core of the central meditative episode” that is “a transaction between the speaking persona and a surrogate self, that is, another person onto whom are projected or disposed key elements of the speaker’s own personality, dilemmas, or thought processes” (602). In “Frost at Midnight,” the infant Hartley serves as Coleridge’s surrogate. After Coleridge shares his lamentations on his physical and emotional confinement in urban England during the latter part of his childhood, Coleridge declares (and rejoices in the fact) that Hartley will be brought up in a more pastoral life and will be closer to nature than his father was. Thus, Coleridge projects on his son his own longing for childhood innocence and his belief that closeness to nature brings happiness.
The familiar motifs of the power of sleep, dreams, and imagination are also present in “Frost at Midnight.” The image that connects these themes is the “thin blue flame” in the fireplace. In “Coleridge and the Scene of Lyric Description,” Christopher R. Miller identifies the “flickering of [the] ember” as a “[counterpoint to] Coleridge’s own insomniac musings” (521). Likewise, Peter Barry asserts that the dying flame is representative of Coleridge’s reproof of the “directionlessness in his thinking” (620). Barry further clarifies Coleridge’s use of the dying flame as a metaphor for his “idling Spirit”: “like the flame, his own intellectual spirit is puny, unable to achieve lift-off, purposeless, narcissistic, and prone to interpret everything as a reflection of itself, so that thought becomes an idle plaything rather than a purposeful instrument” (610). Ultimately, in the first stanza of the poem, Coleridge laments that his insomnia stifles his imagination. Perhaps this is why Coleridge takes pleasure in watching his son sleep, for the poet understands that dreams allow for the flourishing of creativity.