Frost at Midnight

The quiet stagnation of Coleridge's poem means that every movement of air becomes significant evidence of life. While the suggestion that the frost is “[u]nhelped by any wind” (Line 2) paints a desolate, winter landscape, the “owlet’s cry” (Line 2) demonstrates that life continues in these places nonetheless.

Coleridge’s connection between life and the movement of air appears most clearly through his investigation of the “fluttering stranger” (Line 27). The mobile piece of ash “flutter[s] on the grate” (Line 15) due to the fireplace’s hot air. The stranger’s “motion in this hush of nature” (Line 17) is what creates “dim sympathies” (Line 18) with Coleridge and all those who live. This connection also plays out in the child’s “gentle breathings” (Line 46). The child’s breath fills the “intersperséd vacancies” (Line 47) of the cottage, making it an equally “companionable form” (Line 19) as the stranger.

Coleridge positions his child halfway between himself and the “inmates of [his] cottage, all at rest” (Line 4). Though the child is next to him and is his sole human companion in the room, the child “slumbers peacefully” (Line 7). Coleridge suggests that children exist in a liminal, or in-between, state of potentiality. This unrealized potential is most obvious in Coleridge’s reminiscence of his “sister more beloved, / [his] play-mate when [they] were both clothed alike” (Lines 43-44).