Frost At Midnight Analysis

Robert Frost has written a poem about death, consequence, and most importantly, how brief and fragile life can be. He uses a little child as an example to get the reader’s attention. His use of diction, imagery, and other literary devices to make the reader understand

The voice in this poem is one of pure happiness and innocence. In this state of joy, the infant is unaware of the world in which he lives and that awaits him. In these opening lines, we see Blake revealing the everyday modeling and structure that categorizes the world, but is absent in the simplicity and purity of childhood. The child has no name because joy needs no other name. Labeling and classification are products of organization and arrangement that the world uses to assimilate innocence into experience. Blake demonstrates that it is through this transition, that the virtue of child’s play is destroyed. Blake utilizes specific emotions such as “happy,” “joy,” “sweet,” “pretty,” “sing,” and “smile” to describe this uncorrupted state of being. There is no danger, darkness, or struggle for the infant. Instead, he exists in a care free state, free of guilt, temptation, and darkness. The birth of a child is celebrated by Blake and it stirs in us powerful emotions of peace, love, and hope.

The early learning processes of the young are potrayed more adequately in the poem Father and Child where an older child, this time a girl at a rebellious age, experiments with the constraints of authority in an attempt to seek control for herself. This experimentation leads to an important discovery in her life; death is real and unclean. Just like The Glass Jar, the allusions to nature show the certainly of change and setting the tone for the events.

While in stanza two he begins to explain it was a “bleak december”, Clearly setting the sad and seemingly depressing mood. But as the stanza moves on the sadness is filled with creepy suspense as it states that not only the speaker is up late at night on a late, and bleak December night, that the statement “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” finding out that the statement is explaining how the fire in the fireplace is slowly dying out, and the very few pieces of coal the “dying embers” seem to create creepy ghost like shadow around the room which creates the depressed and the creepy suspense filled mood.

For some people, their childhood may have been the best time of their lives, but for others, it could just be many years of memories they dread remembering. Regardless of how someone feels about it, childhood is a critical part of life. In the poems “Birches” by Robert Frost and “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde, the authors explore what it is like to be a child and the major transition from childhood to adulthood. While Frost does so through the voice of an adult, Lorde chose to accomplish this from a child’s perspective. Although, the speakers are not the only aspects of the poem that sets them apart. In “Birches”, Frost describes childhood as a simplistic, carefree and innocent time, while in “Hanging Fire”, Lorde emphasizes the never ending struggles children face when growing up. However, the speakers of the poems do share a common challenge in maintaining personal relationships throughout childhood and beyond.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge viewed the world in a different light than his peers. He was known as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic Period, but he had a hard, troubled life and this was reflected in his poems. Most of his poems were not only made to indulge the reader, but to make the reader think. His poems were much deeper than just their literal meaning. They invited the reader into Coleridge’s heart and mind. In doing so, the reader learned a different way to view the world and what Coleridge felt. Many of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems include intimate self-revelation of the poet by expressing emotions, thoughts, and using spirituality, such as is seen in “This Lime Tree Bower- my Prison” and “Dejection: An Ode”.

The poem begins with, “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,” (1) which gives the reader the impression that the poem is harsh. However, upon further inspection of the poem there is a spectrum of tones which diverge throughout the entire piece. These tones show how the speaker’s attitude towards the subject develops and evolves. The Author to Her Book has a variety of tones that shows the painful process of transition.

This poem dramatizes the conflict between a child who desires a verbalization of love and a father who expresses love through actions rather than words. The first stanza informs the reader that the action of the poem occurred in the past, and the speaker reflects upon it. The speaker describes the house as being “blueblack cold” during the wintertime (2), which not only allows the setting to be determined but also allows an inference to be made about the emotional companionship (or lack thereof) within the house. The father used to awake earlier than the rest of the family in order to start a fire to keep his family as comfortable as possible, though “no one ever thanked him” (5). This line introduces the regret of the reader pertaining to the treatment of the father.

Hayden utilizes diction to set a dark and solemn tone throughout the poem. Like the various examples of imagery, there is also a strong use of underlying symbolism. In the first stanza, the words “cold” (1. 2) and “fires blaze” (1. 5) are used, which introduces a conflict. This is emphasized in the second stanza when the word “cold” (2. 1) is used again, later followed by the word “warm” (2. 2). In the last stanza, the father eventually “had driven out the cold” (3. 2). Yet the father had not ridden the house of the cold air until the end of the poem, which symbolizes how it took his son several years later to recognize the behaviors in which his father conveyed his love for him.

This enhances the feelings of remorse and shows how the speaker’s views of his childhood have changed with the passage of time. In the first stanza, the imagery focuses on the darkness and cold which filled the speaker’s home. By using lines like “put his clothes on in the blueblack cold” (2) and “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering” (6) the speaker shows how despondent his early view of his environment was. The imagery, however, changes from cold to warm as the poem continues, symbolizing a change in the speaker’s feelings for his father. The line “Speaking indifferently to him/ who had driven out the cold” (10-11) in the second stanza shows how the speaker recollects his childhood as an adult and illustrates how his feelings have changed towards his father through a better understanding of his actions. This contrast in imagery greatly adds to the understanding of the overall theme of the poem.

At the end of chapter 20 in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his own experience with poetry and its effect on others’ imagination from an outsiders point of view:

Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, is a poem describing a man’s changing views as he contemplates the natural word which he has been prevented from seeing. Coleridge’s poem demonstrates the ability of individuals to modify their morals and values upon receiving a cathartic release from their relationship with nature, as predicated almost entirely on the imagination. Through allowing the persona to visualise the encounters his friends are making with nature along their journey, Coleridge first demonstrates the capabilities of the imagination in allowing us to picture things in certain detail, as shown through “now my friends emerge,” which in all exemplifies the presence of imagination in our relationship with nature. Furthermore, the description of their journey demonstrates the liberation received from engaging with nature, as shown where they “wander in gladness,” which relates to the cathartic release obtained from viewing nature that pushes us to reassess our ideas and perceptions. By showing his gradual change in tone, the influence of the persona’s imagination is shown, which when in conjunction with his exclamation of “yes!” reveals our emotional capabilities if becoming engulfed in our imaginations of nature. Also, by choosing to allow the persona to speak in a melodramatic tone, the poet is able to again explicitly demonstrate his

Poetry is a literary medium which often resonates with the responder on a personal level, through the subject matter of the poem, and the techniques used to portray this. Robert Frost utilises many techniques to convey his respect for nature, which consequently makes much of his poetry relevant to the everyday person. The poems “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and “The mending wall” strongly illuminate Frost’s reverence to nature and deal with such matter that allows Frost to speak to ordinary people.

With the formation of a “rare device”, symbolizing his masterpiece of poetry, Coleridge acknowledges that poetry forms through the combination of nature and human perception. In the end, Coleridge demands the readers to “beware” (49, p.1634) of the power of the inspired poet, who recreates his own “sunny dome” (47, p.1634) in the protection of a “circle round him thrice” (51, p.1634). The energy from nature is eventually transferred to the poet, the poet to use his imagination to create his own “Paradise” (54, p.1634), which resembles Xanadu of Kubla Khan. Through the metaphors developing in the poem, Coleridge pieces together the process a Romantic poet creates a poem from the inspiration of a nature scene.

One of the largest influences on Coleridge was his unusual adolescence and the people he met, as a child and later on. It is said best as, “For Coleridge, childhood is the shaper of adult destiny” (Gradesaver). The youngest child of ten, he had his father die when he was not even nine years