COLERIDGE’s “Frost at Midnight” is a fine poem for a crisp, frosty January night, especially if you’re indoors with the glowing embers of a good fire in the grate, a glass of something strong at your side, and a good edition in your hands; then, you can really enter into the intimacy of the poem.

“Frost at Midnight” is one of a set of poems that Coleridge called his “Conversation” poems. The aim was that the reader should feel addressed heart to heart, drawn into the poet’s most inner thoughts, shared together quietly.

And that is just what happens in this poem. As you read it, you feel that you’re there, as Coleridge sits before the dying embers of the fire, his slumbering infant beside him, musing with you about his hopes for the boy’s future. So the poem opens:

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. . .

That phrase about the frost performing its secret ministry might seem, at first, only a light poetic personification of the frost and no more. One hardly notices the sacral tenor of the word “ministry”; but, by the end of the poem, when Coleridge deliberately returns to the phrase, it has been transformed and has a depth of meaning which we could scarcely have guessed at first.

How does that happen? Well, at the heart of the poem is a re-enchantment of nature, a whole new way of looking at the world, a deliverance from the cold mechanistic materialism that was afflicting philosophy and science in Coleridge’s day, something that Coleridge called “this miserable watch-making scheme of things”. Coleridge suggests that, instead of the Newtonian/Lockean understanding of nature as a soulless mechanism, we should consider it more as an utterance, a chanted poem, full of meaning, in the midst of which we find ourselves.

So, when he imagines young Hartley Coleridge growing up among

. . . 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. . .

he does not say “so shalt thou see and hear a series of meaningless geological and meteorological phenomena”; but, rather,

. . . so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters. . .

Suddenly, the frost at midnight itself can be understood, for the first time, as part of the divine poem, as something intended by its maker to minister to us a little of the beauty and mystery of the God who utters us and all things into being. We are ready, then, to receive the final lines of the poem, and, in their light, to understand, at last, the deeper sense of its opening lines:

. . . 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.