Frost At Midnight Analysis

Since Samuel Taylor Coleridge is considered one of the founding fathers of the Romanticism movement, his poems reflect the many aspects of Romanticism. “Frost at Midnight” is an excellent example of mysticism. Mysticism is the belief that nature is directly linked to the spiritual world, and thus spiritual revelations can be born out of reflecting on nature. In the poem, the narrator does not have just one encounter with nature that leads him to a revelation. He notices the nature in his current surroundings, which probes him to reflect on his childhood and how the lack of nature affected him.
The first few lines call attention to the frost forming on the window and the narrator hears an owl’s cry. This is our narrator’s first encounter with nature and thus begins his departure into a meditative state, in which “he contemplates the natural world outside the cottage, with the ocean, the forests, and the hills” (Constantakis). His attention is drawn back to the dying fire, which he then compares himself to. He claims that he and the fire are alike “for he sees his own thoughts as fluttering and inconsistent as well” (Constantakis).
The low flames from the fire are called ‘strangers’ in English folklore and “were thought to foreshadow the arrival of an absent friend” (Constantakis). The connection established in the first stanza between the speaker and the fire is significant because this leads the speaker to remember when these ‘strangers’ would visit him as a child. He would spend all day and night staring into the fire, “as though he were studying a book” (Constantakis). His heart would leap if the door opened, for a small part of him hoped it would be “a stranger in the form of a townsman, an aunt, or his sister” (Constantakis). This reflects another Romantic ideal, in which the relationship between man and man is just as important as the relationship between man and nature, or man and beast