Nature Vs. Nurture

Despite its frequent flourishes of naturalistic sounding language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is primarily a treatise on fatherhood. Natural phenomena is not the cause of Coleridge’s musings on a cold winter night, but rather it is the breathing of Coleridge’s “cradled infant” who is “so calm, that it disturbs and vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silence.” The poem is not preoccupied with nature in its own right but rather in nature’s relation to the rearing of Coleridge’s child. Coleridge wishes, as would any new father, for his progeny to live a better life than that of his or her fathers. Living in the country where “my Babe! shalt wander like a breeze” is viewed to be vastly preferential to growing up, like Coleridge did, “In the great city…and saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.” By its conclusion, the poem resembles a father’s blessing rather than a prayer when he writes that “seasons shall be sweet” for to child “whether the summer clothe the general earth with greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow.” Though it may sound like Coleridge is saying that his child will be happy despite rain or sunshine, rather Coleridge says his child will be happy because of both rain and sunshine.