Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sounds and Their Absence in "Frost at Midnight"
One thing that really struck me about "Frost at Midnight" was Coleridge's attention to sounds. As true for most Romantic poems, this piece plays to the senses when describing the landscape. While he acknowledges the visual aspects of the scene around him (the fire, his child, his memories of other seasons) much of his inspiration comes from the "owlet's cry" or "extreme silentness." Some may argue that the silence that Coleridge depicts does not give the reader an aural experience, but I disagree because the "silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet moon," push the sensual understanding of the poem one step further into a trance-like state of reading when contrasted with the singing redbreast. I am currently working on a paper about this poem in comparison to a work by Keats for another class, and I have the final version in my other text. Personally, I think the final version's ending with the depiction of silence is more powerfully sensate than the image of the child that ends this version because the ending with the silent icicles brings the poem full circle to the wintry setting where Coleridge began, mirroring the cyclic, fluidity of seasons and the fluidity of memory.
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I think this fluidity implies a lack of boundaries and creates the impression of an overarching consciousness where the past and present are connected through environmental experience. This feeling seems to increase towards the end of the poem when Coleridge begins to describe the childhood he desires for his son,
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By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: 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.
Great universal Teacher!
Here Coleridge describes a commotional consciousness that unites man and nature.
Though Coleridge is unable to truly “hold commune” with an inanimate object like a film, he implies that the soul seeks to connect with everything around it, as “the living spirit in our frame / That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, / Transfuses into all its own delights / Its own volition.” This universal consciousness cannot be achieved when man places himself within artificial surroundings, but only when he is encompassed by living nature.
I think it also echoes the philosophy that interdependency kept the world in harmony and order. However, your mention of few boundaries is interesting because the harmony is believed to be possible because it is kept inside a "frame" of existence and sense of place. Maybe that Coleridge cannot hold commune with inanimate objects is this frame or boundary, but that would bring up the problem of all things not being interdependent. There is some merit to the idea that the experience of the landscape and nature bridges the past and future and allows for fluidity of consciousness and a unity with nature. Seeing himself as separate would disrupt the continuity of man and nature and thought.
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