40 PA RT O N E
Living miles apart, these two souls thought nothing of walking over for a
visit, Dorothy Wordsworth usually joining her brother. They would tramp
the countryside, and as Coleridge said, Dorothy’s journal entries showed “her
eye watchful” for nature ’s fine detail. Day after day in February 1798, her
pages abound with frost, night, sky and stars, breeze and wind and blast, still-
ness and calm, lakes and shores, clouds, sea, hill, woods, and above all the
moon.
One night Coleridge sat by the cradle of his son Hartley, musing on all that
vivid, shared observation. “Frost at Midnight” begins,
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind...After moving from “Sea, and hill, and wood” back to his own childhood pent
up “In the great city,” he looks ahead for his sleeping child.
Butthou,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.Such workings of imagination will grant his child “The lovely shapes and sounds
intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters.”
Having “Walked with Coleridge over the hills,” Dorothy in one note says
“The redbreasts sang upon the leafless boughs” (as it happens, a perfect iambic
pentameter). You can catch the overland conversation they must have had.
Coleridge, bringing “Frost at Midnight” to a close, turns not toward God but
nature, blessing his son and circling back to the poem’s opening.
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.No abstraction here, but earthliness in textured music, s-sounds and ththread-
ing lines one and two. Then what Dorothy saw becomes a seasonal fullness,
as we hear “the redbreast sit and sing / Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare
branch / Of mossy apple-tree.” And then a moment ’s run-on—