In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge reveals a yearning desire to find a new perception on life that lies outside of dimly cluttered cities. His “Dear Babe / […] whose gentle breathings / fill up the interspersed vacancies and momentary pauses of thought,” seems to represent Coleridge’s inner desire to fill the voids in his mind with something calming and peaceful, likely opposite to city life. For Coleridge, his child represents a new hope for his life to become closer to nature and its beauty. He longs for an understanding of the world from a point of view much closer to nature, and God, than city life. Thus, he aspires that his child will “wander like a breeze / by lakes and sandy shores / and beneath clouds / so shalt thou see and hear / […] that eternal language, which thy God Utters.”
I like that reading of the poem, and I certainly agree that Coleridge displays a great preference for the "natural" life as opposed to life in the city. However, the calm you mentioned is also described as "so calm, that it disturbs/And vexes meditation with its strange/And extreme silentness." How do you reconcile that? Is that just because he is so accustomed to the noise of city life that he finds silence disturbing?
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