Frost at Midnight

The poem expresses hope that Coleridge's son, Hartley, would be able to experience a childhood that his father could not and become a true "child of nature".

Frost at Midnight was written in February 1798 when he described to Thomas Poole aspects of his childhood at Christ's Hospital school that are similar to the content of the poem.

[6] There is another quality to Coleridge's retelling of his childhood experience: he adds supernatural descriptions to the common scenes of his youth.

[7] The Gothic elements of the poem connect it to many of his other works, including Ancient Mariner, "Ballad of the Dark Ladie", Fears in Solitude, France: An Ode, The Nightingale, "Three Graves", and "Wanderings of Cain".

This is similar to what Coleridge's friend William Wordsworth does with the narrator of Tintern Abbey, a poem composed later that year.

[9] Many of the feelings of the narrator for his child are connected to Coleridge's sonnet "To a Friend Who Asked, How I Felt When the Nurse Presented My Infant to Me".

[11] Like many of the conversation poems, Frost at Midnight touches on Coleridge's idea of "One Life", which connects mankind to nature and to God.

The boy would become a "child of nature" and raised free of the constraints found in philosophical systems produced by those like William Godwin.

The flicker of the ash film reminds the reader of the delicate nature of memory and how the past is like a shadow only barely hanging on.

[14] In terms of philosophy, Coleridge brings together ideas in George Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision and David Hartley's Observations on Man.

[15] Christopher Moody, in the Monthly Review of May 1799, declared that the original six lines of the ending were "flat", a view that Coleridge probably agreed with.

This curve of memory and prophesy gives the poem a rich emotional resonance – sadness, poignancy, hope, joy – held in exquisite tension".