Frost at Midnight

 In the lockdown I've been paying more attention to art.  I've listened to a lot more music, I've read more fiction, and I've read more poetry.  I found a collection called Poems that Make Grown Men Cry:  100 Men on the Words that Move Them.  It's pretty good.  The editors asked various men to identify a poem that made them cry and to explain why.  They then put the explanations and the poems into the book.

One of the poems is "Frost at Midnight," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Coleridge was both a poetic genius and a drug addict, and his career has a Rock God quality to it.  At his best, very few poets in English can match him.  In 1798, when he was 26 years old, he wrote a poem about his baby daughter.  Here's how it begins:

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,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings:  save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

So there he is, sitting up at night, in the middle of winter, watching his baby daughter while she sleeps, and thinking about his life.  If you are the father of a daughter, you know what that's like.  Coleridge then reflects on the meaning of life, and of his own childhood, before coming back to his daughter.  All of this takes awhile.  Finally, he thinks about how he grew up in London, "the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,/And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars."  However, he plans to raise his daughter in the country.  So, like all fathers of daughters, he promises that she will live better than he did.  And with that thought, the poem really takes off, before eventually coming back to the frost:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

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!  he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Here's the thing.  I have had all of those thoughts.  I have sat up at night with my sleeping children, and felt the great ambitions roiling and roaring inside of me.  But I could never figure out how to phrase them.  So I'm really glad that Coleridge did.  That's what poetry does.  And that's why it can make grown men cry.