K. M. Wheeler (1981). 'Frost at Midnight': a Study of Identity in Difference. In The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry (pp. 92-120). London: Heinemann.

Wheeler shows how Coleridge portrays an emergent process in the poem: consciousness develops an active sense of its processes and endows with value the things around it:

The speaker is trying to report what is happening to him right now, and thereby to provide the reader with a model of 'nowness'. Not only are external objects observed, assimilated, and made actively present and valuable to the mind; the process of assimilation itself becomes an object of observation. (95)

This creates what Wheeler terms "the landscape of the mind," the "generative conditions of imaginative awakening" that the opening of the poem develops (95).

At the same time, the poem also poses a question about the imagination, which Wheeler sees being pursued in particular by the imagery of "frost" and by the speaker's empathy with the "film" on the fire.

The "frost" image is given special importance because it frames the poem, occurring both at the beginning and at the end. It is a "problematic image," having "both threatening and friendly connotations" (96). In one light it appears to represent the imagination, a self-activated energy beyond the consciousness or will. On the other hand,

its cold, frozen whiteness and the antithesis with wind, often an image of imagination (as is the breeze in 'The Eolian Harp'), disturbs the simplicity of the association of imagination with the frost. (96)

Thus the frost may be seen as "freezing over perception through inactivity, or at least in its cold and frozen lifelessness as antithetical to feeling and warmth" (106). In this sense, Wheeler suggests it indicates both the promise and the liability of imagination. The frost may be "an image both of imagination and of the force which may freeze up or inactivate imaginative activity, that is, an image of mind as creative or as repressively mechanical." Here, she suggests,

Coleridge achieves in this doubly connotative image a truer characterization of the nature of imaginative experience and its inherent conflict with the passive and the degenerate. For along with the joy of vision comes inevitably the chilling sensation of falling back into unenlivened ordinary perception. The dual nature of imaginative experience is thus captured in this complex image of frost, expressing the conflict between the mind as essentially creative or passive. (110)

Wheeler sees the duality of the frost image as pointing also to a view of language: she notes that for Coleridge "words lose the power of truth by becoming too familiar to excite the mind to a perception of the vital and integral relations represented, especially by metaphor" (110). Our perceptions can thus decay and freeze over. In one sense, Coleridge is asking in this poem what value to place on his own perceptions. This is evident in the passage on the film that flutters on the grate.

After his musings are interrupted, Coleridge focuses on his immediate surroundings: a process of "filtering and rejection of external objects" (p. 97) leads him to promote the flame and the film on the fire as objects of special attention. His empathy with the film suggests the freedom of imagination:

The phrase 'by its own moods interprets' states that this idle, imaginative spirit acts to 'interpret' or imbue objects with symbolic meaning according to its own laws and nature. In 'seeking an echo or mirror of itself' it posits itself as object to itself, by humanizing the apparently lifeless things around it. That is, it everywhere finds metaphors of itself, and fills up the chasm between subject and object with these relations, or 'toys of Thought' (99).

But he is not only thinking about the film, he is also thinking about the process of such thoughts: "He is toying with them as thoughts revealing the workings of the mind" (99). But this thought then allows him to go beyond the present moment, since the film of the present is also the "stranger" of the past. Thus "the mind is now at that threshold experience . . . of waiting for something to happen, for some relation to emerge, and for some unknown to be transformed into a known" (99). Stanza II, Wheeler argues, shows "the memory as itself a kind of environment that can provide the imagination with a treasure-house of objects to internalize" (99). Now his memories of school provide a "mirror or echo" in which to seek objects "to be made toys of thought" (100).

The speaker of the present is now compared to the infant he remembered at school: both are longing for something which cannot be attained. "The infantile fantasy remembered here is perhaps well interpreted as a metaphor for the craving for certainty that the adult 'still' hopes to see." The speaker, Wheeler adds, "is always thrown back upon himself and upon subjectivity, and . . . this is all the certainty he can ever expect" (101).

In turning to his baby and to the future, Coleridge is able to transcend his own limitations and his lost childhood. While he can never return to childhood or repair the damage done then, the myth of childhood "as a permanent state of imaginative play" becomes "valuable as a metaphor for rejecting and overcoming preconditioned response, habit, and the prejudices of adulthood that spread a film over spontaneous perception" (102).

Coleridge thus appears to transcend time in the final verse stanza:

its generalized reference to seasons and scenes suggests the freedom from specific time and space designation characteristic of the creative mind, but it also suggests that the speaker is being what he hopes his child will become, responsive to nature, both human nature and external nature. (104)

Wheeler's chapter also offers a detailed meditation on Coleridge's interest in the theory of pre-existence (112-120).