Frost at Midnight Analysis

Blank verse is great—no rhyming, no pressure. Just keep each line down to ten syllables. (Did you see what we did there? That last sentence was ten syllables.) "What a scam!" you cry. "Where was...

Now, when it comes to speakers in poetry, it's never a good idea to assume that the "I" of the poem is the actual poet him-herself. What if that poet is using a character to narrate the poem? Sound...

In "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge describes the place where he was living at the time—a cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, England, near the Quantock Hills. But he also reflects on his childhood...

Since Coleridge is trying to sound like a person having a real conversation, he keeps his poem relatively free of anything artificial or frilly. He isn't using a rhyming form of verse, but there's...

The poem begins and ends with the image of "frost at midnight" as it performs its "secret ministry"—freezing the earth and water, and forming icicles (1-2, 71-75). "Ministry" naturally makes us t...

Coleridge and Wordsworth (and plenty of the other Romantic poets) were all about "natural piety." Wordsworth famously wrote, "The Child is father of the Man;/ And I could wish my days to be/ Bound...

This poem is fairly simple on the surface, but it also deals with some heady, conceptual territory. There are some obscure vocabulary words, but it's basically pretty straightforward in that sense....

Coleridge and his friend, the poet Robert Southey, wanted to form a utopian community in Pennsylvania, where everyone would own property in common and share labor evenly. It never happened, althoug...

There's no sex in this poem—except for maybe when Coleridge wonders about what's going on in the town this late at night (we're joking… we think). It's aimed at adults, obviously, but it's very...

William Wordsworth (51-53): In The Prelude (a long poem which William Wordsworth wrote with Coleridge in mind), Wordsworth says: "I did not pine like one in cities bred/ As was thy melancholy...