Kelvin Everest (1979). "Frost at Midnight." In Coleridge's Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795-1798 (pp. 258-270). Sussex: Harvester Press.

The best conversation poems develop out of 'some lonely feeling', but the feeling is only a starting point . . . for an ascending rhetorical structure that is fulfilled in a vision of community. (216)

Everest's account of the poem focuses on the discovery of a reciprocity between mind and nature that overcomes the division or separateness shown at the beginning. At the opening of the poem the "diction carries an elusive resonance." In the first line, for example, the verb performs "subtly reinforces the sense of a task to be done," but one that is "at once lonely and isolated, introspective and wary, and yet very important, full of potential and implication; like the task of a secret agent" (259). Similarly, Coleridge's "abstruser musings" separated him from the world as well as from the child sleeping beside him, while "the calm that follows this loss of personal contact carried the threat of loneliness, of a stark separateness in human relations" (260).

Thus, Everest continues, "there is the sense that Coleridge is foreign in his environment, that he has no place in it, and this faintly carries over the suggestions of 'secret ministry', as though Coleridge were a spy in an alien country, working alone, under cover, to change it for the better" (260).

The opening lines are followed by a sense of quickening, as the speaker's attention registers the extreme calm: this is shown by the exclamation points after 'village' and 'dreams'. "By building a relationship with these circumstances he will generate the capacity to find a greater unity, encompassing a general connectedness between men, between man and nature, between present, past, and future" (261). The unity with the "companionable form" of the film, however, is a frail one, as "puny" and intermittent as the movement of the film, a unity that is "not discovered but made" (262). Nevertheless, the "toy" that this makes of thought creates "a relieving lightness of tone, a sense that the threatening element in his solitude is mastered, and that his musings now have the innocent creativity of a child's play" (262).

Coleridge's memory of his school, with its daydream of his home village, establishes "an unexpected continuity in Coleridge's experience" (265). The "stranger" shows a relation across time: "as this unity in experience emerges, so the poem simultaneously telescopes out in range," including "a forward temporal perspective as Coleridge contrasts his past childhood with the future childhood that awaits Hartley" (265). Coleridge's "stern preceptor" will be replaced by the universal teacher that Hartley will perceive through nature. Thus "Coleridge will realise his own lost potential in the development of his son's consciousness" (267). Coleridge's sympathetic identification with Hartley "transforms the constraint of retirement into a basis for positive and unifying awareness, that can accommodate the whole range of experience" (267). As Everest remarks, referring to Hartley's envisaged wanderings "like a breeze,"

The 'mirror' that has been discovered in the 'stranger', the intensifying, inter-reflective quality in Coleridge's distinctive complementary development of thought and emotion, has foreshadowed the revelation of a universal reciprocity, in nature, between nature and man (268)

In the final stanza this discovered unity is celebrated: "The implication of universality generates an atmosphere of apocalyptic promise," a unity reflected in the diction in

a perfectly balanced composure, developing out of the quiet, confident precision of 'Therefore . . . '; the high concentration of assonance, and consonantal rhymes on 's', on 'm' and 'n', and most particularly on 'th', combine to a completely natural musicality, an apparently unconsidered aural complexity. The unity is a product of linguistic patterning, that can relate the most distant phenomena . . . (269)

Unlike the threatening silence of the opening, the silence at the end is that of quiet interchange, "a part of Coleridge's creative receptivity, his quiet confidence in a unity to which he belongs. The silence is both a condition and a product of that awareness of belonging . . . " (270).