Frost at Midnight

Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" follows the speaker's internal thoughts on a cold winter night, as he muses on nature, his childhood, and the future of his own child that "sleeps cradled by his side." Coleridge idealizes the beauty and serenity of nature, and though he himself grew up in the city, he is glad that his child will grow up in the country. The classic Romantic themes of appreciation of nature and sentimentalism are clearly at work throughout the speaker's musings. The form of non-rhyming lines in iambic pentameter enforces the sense that the poem is a sort of internal monologue, and the visual imagery of the beauty of nature, such as the "mossy apple-tree" and the seasons that have "clothed the general earth/With greenness" are the speaker's daydream of the idyllic countryside in which his sleeping infant will be raised. The description of the changing seasons also reflects the cycle of life: progression from spring to summer to fall to winter mirrors the speaker's childhood where he was "...rear'd/In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim," progression to adulthood, and now birth of his own son who will be raised to "wander, like a breeze,/By lakes and sandy shores."