Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" | Close Reading and Analysis | Greater Romantic Lyrics

we're beginning our series on the greater romantic lyric with Samuel Taylor coleridge's Frost at midnight one of the most beautiful long poems that we have in English and one of the most artistically coherent poems that Coleridge wrote he wrote this in February 1798 when he was friends with Wordsworth it was an intense period of collaboration between the two and this one was written first but we'll see in wordsworth's poem tintern Abbey that Wordsworth will draw upon many of the lyrical turns that are happening in this poem this is called a conversation poem which Coleridge actually invented this form usually consists of blank verse which is unrhymed iambic pentameter lines so we see that each line has roughly five stressed syllables in iambic pentameter and it's written in a conversational mode in an idiomatic language we'll see that it starts out with with a scene in an address to someone as though he's addressing us as a confidante as a friend and so that's one of the marks of the conversation poems certainly this is one of the greater romantic lyrics that enacts this movement out in and out again we'll see here in the beginning how the meter is mostly iambic but like Wordsworth and tintern Abbey the first line is not strict iambic pentameter you'll see here the frost performs it's secret Ministry see here's an I am unstressed stress there's one unit there's a second there's the third then we have something here another I am and then a peric which is two unstressed syllables but notice how it starts to Fall Away the frost performs its secret Ministry it's kind of moving into the secret this this idea of secret which comes from the Latin set apart separate um isolated or obscure and these poems they often begin in a state of extreme isolation and then move out into community and of course it has this connotation as well of secret is reserved unknown or mysterious and it's performing laying the crust of warfrost and perhaps the little icicles on the window because it's it's it's performing and so this poem itself is very interested in performance and form of its own Ministry of how the the words like the frost are moving across the page and how they're unfolding here we have this in the present tense notice this present tense ...