Paul Magnuson (1991). The Politics of "Frost at Midnight." The Wordsworth Circle, 22, 3-11.

Magnuson takes issue with earlier critics who saw "Frost at Midnight" as a poem in which Coleridge had liberated himself from the topical concerns of the day. On the contrary, it is "a political poem if it is read in the dialogic and public context of Coleridge's other poems and the political debate of the 1790's" (3). Magnuson's argument focuses on reinserting the poem in its first context, its publication in the quarto pamphlet Fears in Solitude, issued in the Autumn of 1798 by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson (for the text see 1798 version; use Back button to return).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the radical activity of the earlier 1790s in which Coleridge himself had played a role, the forces of repression by 1798 were actively on the attack. The poems of Coleridge and his collaborator Southey were being parodied in the Anti-Jacobin, an organ of conservative pro-government views. The publication of "Frost at Midnight" in this context appears to be an act of defence on the part not only of Coleridge, but also of the publisher Johnson. Coleridge's pamphlet, Magnuson argues, puts forward an image of himself as a lover of his country and of the domestic virtues, "as a necessary self-defense, done at the moment of pressure from both the press and the government, and done in concert with others who themselves were under similar pressure" (6).

As the reviewer in the Monthly Review (May 1799) put it, "Frost at Midnight" displays "a pleasing picture of virtue and content in a cottage," hardly a penetrating critical comment of interest to us in these days of deconstruction and hermeneutics, until one recognizes that the word "content" implies the negation of its opposite. Coleridge is not discontent, not ill-disposed to the existing state of society; he is not, therefore, seditious. (6)

The domestic terms in which the poem presents its meaning are not neutral. The poem's language in 1798

is not the creation of private circumstances or private meditation. Its language is defined by the rhetoric of public oratory, not the rhetoric of symbolism and allegory . . . Since it was placed in 1798 in the public dialogue, it cannot represent rural retirement as an evasion of political issues, although it is certainly evasive.

The poem is "not the private meditation of an isolated consciousness, but the testimony of a public figure" (9).

This context alerts us to other meanings of the poem's images and figures. To give just one of Magnuson's several examples,

The reference to "abstruser musings" becomes a problem. In a symbolic reading Coleridge is alone in his cottage in the silence of night quite removed from the intrusive presence of sensible activity and permitted to think philosophically about the activity of nature, the ministry of frost and its ultimate cause and purpose. Yet in the public context "abstruse" thinking sounds suspiciously like the kind of abstraction and metaphysics that Burke saw as part of the origin of the Revolution. . . . What after all could Coleridge be thinking about so abstrusely? (9-10)

Magnuson suggests that if we read "Frost at Midnight" in its original context, then the musings in this poem must be the same as the "solitary musings" of "Fears in Solitude," where Coleridge anticipates the fearful consequences of an invasion by the French and war on his own countryside (a real threat in 1798).

Coleridge's defence in 1798 is a necessary one: "If Coleridge was dodging, it was because the heat was on him, and his associates Stuart [editor of the Morning Post] and Johnson, from the government and the hostile press" (10).