Frost at Midnight1
The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud?and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
5 Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
io And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low burnt fire, and quivers not;
15 Only that film,2 which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
20 Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
1. The scene is Coleridge's cottage at Nether fire, he watches 'The sooty films that play upon Stowey; the infant in line 7 is his son Hartley, then the bars, / Pendulous and foreboding, in the view
aged seventeen months. / Of superstition prophesying still, / Though still
2. In all parts of the kingdom these films are called deceived, some stranger's near approach.' Several strangers and supposed to portend the arrival of editions of Cowper's poems were advertised on the
some absent friend [Coleridge's note]. The 'film' verso of the last page of Coleridge's text in the 1798
is a piece of soot fluttering on the bar of the grate. volume in which 'Frost at Midnight' was first pub-
Cf. Cowper's The Task 4.292-95, in which the lished.
poet describes how, dreaming before the parlor
.
FROST AT MIDNIGHT / 465
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
25 Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place,3 and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
30 From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt
35 Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's4 face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
