Coleridge on Paternity Leave

Some readers may have noticed a slowdown in the production of emails This is because my daughter was born on the 21st of September. As a consequence, I have done very little reading or thinking, at least nothing unrelated to babies.

Every night, and much of the day, however, I read dozens of contradictory articles about baby behaviour, how to read baby signs. How to understand them. How to shut them up. When to worry if they stop crying. Everyone on Mumsnet or Netmums worries about their unique baby-situation, worries about that uniqueness itself, hoping that others will chime in, and say that it’s ok, it happened to them too. At third hand, I read these, and try to see if they match my situation, or if my baby is alone, with only me for company in the moments when I try to guard her mother’s sleep by cradling her downstairs.

A friend of mine told me that what I had to do to make it through the first weeks of parenthood was to stop reading these kinds of posts immediately. There is no need to spend your time googling rashes. “Why don’t you read ‘Frost at Midnight’, instead?”, she suggested.

It’s hard for me to read ‘Frost at Midnight’ with fresh eyes. The conversation poems, in general, I think, have underpinned almost every thought I’ve had about poetry, and maybe also the nature of reality. And yet, it really did change the poem to reconsider it as a Dad poem, as a Dad reader.

When I started thinking about Coleridge, I thought of him as a philosophical poet, providing me with philosophical resources that I needed to be a serious poet. This poem, like all the conversation poems—a series of blank verse meditations addressed to particular listeners that, if you ask me and MH Abrams, established the blueprint for almost all important post-romantic anglophone poetry—I took to be about the relationship between the subject—the perceiving mind—and the world. It is about whether we receive impressions from a world of objects, or impose our fancies on them, or participate together with them in the shared work of creation. I always kind of reckoned this has something to do with philosophical problems raised by Kant.

But actually, you don’t need Kant, or any real concern with ‘how the external world is fitted to the mind’, to read this poem, because you can also read it as a poem about loneliness. It’s about Coleridge’s very specific loneliness, and the way that thought itself hovers between a symptom of that loneliness and its cure. It is the child, Coleridge’s son, Hartley, to whom the poem is addressed, who in the end tips the scales away from loneliness; even as he says and does nothing, he does not leave Coleridge alone.

Here’s the beginning of the poem in the final version Coleridge published, which is not necessarily the standard reading version:

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelp'd by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'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 flutter'd on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

As someone who has spent some time recently on the sofa with a baby snoozing, hoping that she won’t wake up to feed immediately, I can relate to this. Save that I tend to watch TV, rather than stare at a fire, and also that my house is next to a road, so I can hear the regular roar of traffic. But I want to point out the funny situation of solitude, here. Yes, the scene is ‘calm’, but this calm becomes active. From the very beginning, Coleridge is surrounded by living things even as actual living beings hush. As the world quietens down, he is not left alone, exactly, but turns the world into companions. The frost performs its secret ministry, it behaves in some sense like a person.

A lot of people have made hay with the connotations of the ministry here. Is Coleridge really concerned with the secret police, as someone who was briefly investigated for radicalism? Is that the secret ministry? Is there a cryptic religious politics here? Did Coleridge edit the poem to tame it and remove the all important political radicalism of his early years? Did he write it to disavow his radical politics in the first place?  Personally, I don’t care. I think that need to aggrandize the poem, to make it into an intervention into the politics of the 1790s is symptomatic of a great failure of imagination. Is a poem a better poem if we think that it has something to say about the suspension of Habeas Corpus or the newspaper publication act of 1798? The secret ministry of frost is subtler than that. It’s just part of the liveliness of the world Coleridge begins to notice.

Such a liveliness is something that seems to me fundamental to the music of the poem, moreso than the historical entanglements that scholarship tends to train us to value. One of the nice sonic touches, for example, comes when Coleridge hits the dead centre of ‘that solitude, which suits/ Abstruser musings’. Here, ‘itude’ begins a pattern of Schwa followed by long U: itude which suits abstruse ermuse. Is this repetition a pointed blankness, no variation, Coleridge alone? Or is it an echo, evidence of company, provided where you least expect it, in solitary musings. Can it be both at the same time? Can it be that the pattern of language itself is a social thing; when you use it to express your loneliness, you are no longer totally alone. You end up giving life to dead sounds, or finding it there. Things become meaningful.

This is what the fire does too, while the baby slumbers on. Coleridge offers the fire as a sort of Rorschach test, a companionable form, on which we begin to project our hopes for a world that is alive and responsive to ourselves.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,

To which the living spirit in our frame,
That loves not to behold a lifeless thing,
Transfuses its own pleasures, its own will.

It’s not that the fire is alive, exactly, but that we need to read it as alive. The spirit likes to find traces of itself in the world. Does that then make it alive? If it touches us, perhaps it is wrong to say that it simply receives life from us, projected onto its lifelessness. We need it, light and warmth, and it becomes life, it enters into us. Coleridge appears to suggest that. In the earlier version, he describes this as an ‘idle thought’, and in yet another ‘a toy of thought’, made by ‘the idling spirit, but the revision, a conceptual improvement in my opinion, if not perhaps a dramatic one, re-energizes this act of imaginative projection. Transfusion here is unlikely to be referring to blood, but the word does imply a common ability to serve as a vessel for spirit.   

This version replaces a kind of negative transition that follows the fire, where Coleridge reaches an impasse with his ‘toy’ and then uses a ‘But’ to get to his own personal history.  Perhaps that gap is more sincere than the final unity of the final poem, but I think we gain enough with the transfusion to compensate.  Coleridge joins together an apparently universal need to find companionable forms to his own biography. He partakes of infinity in a specific way formed from his loneliness at school in London:

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gaz'd upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place; and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-Day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

[…]

It is through his own personal story that Coleridge discovers his need to make objects meaningful, to find them alive, and through this, he discovers the needs of others—to be lonely is to enter into a shared condition.

This shared solitude is what poems are for, a refinement of what language is for. It seems to be important to Coleridge that the memories of life around him are ‘articulate sounds’. The threshold between the meaningfulness of language, and the meaningfulness of a fire or the church bells is one that Coleridge is constantly worrying in this poem. These echoes are meaningful to him personally, but they also seem to be, in the poem, meaningful beyond himself, beyond his own memories; making them into spirit vessels, as the poem does, will somehow express something that represents and redeems his loneliness. There’s a certain kind of puzzle of categories here, how do we get from sounds without meaning, to sounds with meaning, where and how does the spirit enter?

*

The word infant, as a cursory google search will tell you, comes from the word infans in latin, which means unspeaking. Hartley Coleridge, the infant babe of the poem was about a year and a half old, so could well have been saying the odd word, but nevertheless, was likely pretty mute. Perhaps, (like my daughter is doing now, causing me to leave and then return to this sentence many hours later) he cried a lot. Like her, he probably made signs which we are told to read as hunger or distress, but which certainly do not contain those words or those concepts. This makes babies an interesting test case when we consider the question that Coleridge calls spirit. Is the baby’s spirit made of the kinds of meanings we find in language? I think Coleridge was puzzled by this question in this poem, by the question of what it means to be unspeaking.

There’s a lovely little entry in Seamus Perry’s selection of Coleridge’s endlessly rewarding notebooks, which seems to be a tributary to ‘Frost at Midnight’:

Infancy and Infants —

1.      The first smile – what kind of reason it displays – – the first smile after sickness. —

2.      Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells drooping over the rosy face —

3.      Stretching after the stars. —

4.       Seen asleep by the light of glowworms.

5.       Sports of infants – their incessant activity, the means being the end. –

6.      Nature how lovely a school-mistress – A blank-verse, moral poem –

7.      children at houses at Industry. —

8.       Infant beholding its new born Sister.

9.      Kissing itself in the looking-glass

10.    The Lapland Infant, seeing the Sun.

11.    An infant’s prayer on its mother’s Lap / mother directing a Baby’s hand. Hartley’s love to Papa – scrawls pothooks, & reads what he meant by them. —

Coleridge wants to think about the ‘reason’ of infants, the spirit in their unspeaking, which must be read. These things have to be taken for signs. When the infant is inducted into language, he is able to read what he means by a pothook, which is a kind of s shaped bracket that looks like an S. Note the parallel here between material object and language. Things become letters, and then form words. To read is to believe in the aliveness of things.

It seems to me that this belief is also a necessary part of being a parent, beginning when the baby is not a baby, is still a fetus, and has no legal personhood, and whose character is made mostly of her parents desire for her to exist. Obviously, once she is born, you see a baby wriggle and scream in your hands, you hear her snuffle against your neck in what you, if you are a dad like Coleridge, might take to be disappointment that you do not have a breast to offer. But what evidence do you have for this ascription of a mental state, or ‘spirit’?

Perhaps, Coleridge’s poem suggests, it is your own experience, long suppressed but undeniable, of becoming a member of the community of language, of turning the apparently inarticulate material of the world into the inside of your own head. This is not to say that language is what makes a person a person, but rather that the fact language emerges from non-language demonstrates a kind of continuity between mind and world, they are the same substance; the screaming baby and the poet are about the same business.

Coleridge, I think, uses his son as an example of how the material of the world is spirit. Over time, Hartley will take it in, he will observe the world, he will listen to the articulate sounds and they will become language and then we will, if we want to believe, believe in his personhood as proof of some spirit. The world itself is alive and people testify to that aliveness in a language that is derived from the material world itself. It is this process which rescues Coleridge from loneliness. You can never be alone, because you are part of what he came to call ‘the one life’. That doesn’t mean you can’t be personally lonely, but instead it means that Hartley will have the opportunity to learn this lesson of not being alone earlier. Coleridge will do better by him than his parents managed. He will bring Hartley into closer contact with the evidence of the one life:

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My Babe so beautiful! it thrills[errata 5]) my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore
And in far other scenes! For I was rear'd
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Coleridge is excited to teach Hartley how to read the world, and to learn how to read Hartley. The poem itself is an enactment of the movement from material to meaning of which parenthood seems , certainly to me right now, to be the most dramatic example.

This is a philosophical point, sure, but it’s also a kind of proof that parenthood is, or should be, the end of loneliness. No, not the end of loneliness, but the end of being alone. What you thought was just you becomes this other person, and you both are made of something else, something bigger than yourself. You can see the rapture of togetherness at the end, where Coleridge focuses so intently on the world again. The close of this poem is a famously beautiful passage of observation that is full of transfusion, where everything is contained by something else and contains something else, where we see the light in the ice that is the light shared between us all:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eve-drops fall,
Heard only in the Trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Coleridge cut the poem’s original final lines about Hartley to return to the beginning, the frost, in order to give the poem a sense of roundness, of interconnectedness, and I think this brings him closer to Hartley, as the poem encloses them in a shared world. Parenthood teaches Coleridge the lesson that he wants to teach to his child.

On the baby forums, everyone is hoping that by speaking to each other, they can learn to read their babies. By doing that, they won’t be left alone. We need language to remind us that we are not alone. At 3AM I find the traces of someone else with the same anxiety about the doings of their baby as I have, and I imagine myself to be helped by this. But really, it seems to me that the lesson of a poem like ‘Frost at Midnight’ is that the unspeaking infant already makes you less alone. Her actions contain the same kind of meaning that the internet posts do, only moreso, and you’ll learn more from attending to them. That’s why the poem ends with the silent icicles, which do not speak, but do mean, and indeed transform from silent to quiet when you listen hard enough. Having an unspeaking person slumbering by your side helps you to see how everything speaks.

I can hear my baby gurgle in the Moses basket, and now the gurgling gathers into a kind of lip smacking that means she’ll wake up soon and need to feed. That means I need to go now, and abandon this email.