"Frost at Midnight" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Channel: Yarabi Curiel
Date: 29/04/2019

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
                                                                              1772 – 1834
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21st, 1772 in the small town of Ottery St. Mary, in rural Devonshire. He was the youngest of ten children born to John Coleridge, vicar of the town and master of grammar school and his second wife, Ann Bowden. There were also three surviving half sisters by John Coleridge’s first wife, who died in 1751. Coleridge showed a devotion to books at an early age, he was far more accustomed to the conversation of adults. The most traumatic experience of Coleridge’s early years, 1781 when he was nearly nine, was the sudden death of his father in the middle of an October night. After, his father’s death Coleridge was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a school for orphans. The life he had at Christ’s hospital was harsh and he describes it in poems such as Frost at Midnight and his verse Letter to Sara Hutchinson. The reaction Coleridge had to living at Christ’s Hospital was that of depression and recalcitrance. In 1791, Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, he was an accomplished scholar. He found little intellectual stimulation at the University and enlisted in the Light Dragoons (British Army) under the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. He was rescued by his bothers and sent back to Cambridge. Coleridge left the University in 1794 without a degree. Coleridge had poetic aspirations, was a radical in religion and politics, and sympathized with the republican experiment in France. In June 1794, He met Robert Southey in Oxford and met his first wife through his friendship with Southey. Coleridge married Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey’s fiancée. Coleridge had collaboration with Wordsworth in 1795. They published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth spent a winter in Germany, were he attended the University of Göttingen. Coleridge returned back to England in 1800, he gradually became disaffected from his wife and fell helplessly and hopelessly in love with Sara Hutchinson. She was the sister of Wordsworth’s wife. During that time Coleridge had been taking laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) to ease the painful physical ailments from which he had suffered from an early age. In 1800 – 1801, heavy dosages during his attacks of rheumatism made opium a necessity to him and Coleridge soon recognized that the drug was a greater evil than the disease it did not cure. Once Coleridge noticed his drug addiction, his downfall began and was accused of gross plagiarism. The remaining years of his life he spent with Dr. ad Mrs. Gillman. They took care of him through his drug addiction until he died. Coleridge was poet, critic, and philosopher. He was one of the important and influential literary theorist of the nineteenth century. 
  Coleridge wrote Frost at Midnight and published it with first ‘Recantation,’ France: an Ode and Fears in Solitude in February 1798 along with Lyrical Ballads. Frost at Midnight was written when he spent a winter in Germany with Wordsworth and attended the University of Göttingen. The poem was meant for a public audience and it is a meditative conversation. The poem is about a conversation he is having with himself and meditating about nature combined with life experiences. He talks about his life as a child and his wishes for his Hartley. Coleridge compares his having to stay enclosed in a cottage to what the winter frost does to nature. For the most part he says that the frost keeps nature suppressed, but when the sun comes out and the seasons change life starts to arise. This a cycle that keeps happening over and over again. The same with humans people are destined to die, but more people are born every day. The poem shows readers that life has a cycle and we should enjoy what we have before we do not have it anymore. Frost at Midnight is used as poem of reflection over nature and life. Coleridge makes great points about life and how we should see interpret life. 


                                                                          Bibliography
Beer, John. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), poet, critic, and philosopher.  
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  October 04, 2008. Oxford University Press,. Date of access 17 Apr. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5888

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 - 1834. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. 441- 444.

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Bradley-Watkins, Mary. The Seasons. 1947. Artstor, library-artstor-org.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/asset/APHILLIPSIG_10313650298