Frost at Midnight
the secret ministry
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‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This passage, from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” comes to my mind often during the Christmas season. The scene, in which Coleridge is awake on a cold night, watching his sleeping child and listening to the cries of owls, will look to many modern readers like a sort of rustic ideal. Anyone who’s active on Substack and follows the literary set will know that, in this digital age, what we tend to idealize most is silence and rustic simplicity. People post a lot of AI-generated images of books and fireplaces.
But for Coleridge, who struggled with addiction and mental illness, this sort of isolation wasn’t a cozy retreat from the vicissitudes of life; it was the home territory of his deamons. Melancholy by disposition and tortured by (baseless) feelings of personal inadequacy, this friend of William Wordsworth’s, this great theorist and poet of the Romantic Period, found loneliness hard to endure.
My wife, who works in an estate planning firm, has told me that people really do die more often in December. Suicide is also at its highest in the bleak midwinter. For all its joys, pleasures, and hints at the infinite, December is the hardest month for many, because even good stress is a form of stress for those who have lots to occupy them and, for those who have little, it’s a grim reminder of their loneliness, the failings of their families or ambitions, the fundamental limitations of humanity in general.
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Coleridge was haunted by dark thoughts like those. He was the sort of person for whom the owl’s cry at midnight wasn’t a naturalist’s thrill but a memento mori. My last post celebrated the value of contemplative stillness as a virtuous practice—one that gets enforced for the gardener, or at least encouraged, by the hard freeze of northern winters. But, even while I wrote that piece, I felt the prick of the other edge of the blade: the grief, confusion, and isolation winter brings for many people, as it always has. And I thought of Coleridge, as I often do.
Thought of him, and thanked him because, even though he acknowledged—and embraced—the “abstruser musings” of the bleakest season, he didn’t end his poem on them. Turning his inward eye away from the “secret ministry of frost,” he chose to fix his attention on his sleeping child:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee…
The nativity allusions here, though subtle, are unavoidable. Coleridge’s observation that a child’s breath is capable of filling up “the intersperséd vacancies” of a tortured mind means more than that his moody thoughts got interrupted. The child’s regular breathing doesn’t break up his thinking; it “fills up” its philosophical vacancies, elevating him into a new mode—a contemplative mode rather than a melancholy one. Through the child’s ministry, a ministry it could not possibly know it had performed, Coleridge is liberated from himself and enabled to hear “The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters…”.
Frost actually does perform some secret ministries, hardening the upper layers of soil into insulation, forcing dissiduous trees into a dormancy that protects their sap from freezing and bursting their bark, and enhancing the flavor of crops like chard, kale, and spinach. Inasmuch as this is a newsletter about gardening, we can celebrate its natural virtues. But frost’s ministry in Coleridge’s life was spiritual, not natural: it quieted the world so he could hear a child’s breath. Even if this season his hard for you, even if the silence is painful, I hope you’ll hear the breathing too, and see the light of the thin blue flame.
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