Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

Yesterday's poem was by William Wordsworth, and today's poem is by his contemporary, Samuel

Teller Coleridge, who lived from 1772 to 1834. Like Wordsworth, he was an English poet,

but he was also a literary critic philosopher

in Theologian, who was a founding member of the Romantic Movement in England and a member

of the lake poets.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Frost at Midnight.

And it's pretty long because I'm only going to read it once, but I wanted to read

some comments quickly from a book called A Little Book on Form by the poet Robert Haas.

And he's talking about the ode, and he writes this.

Oads got written throughout the 17th century and were revived big time in the latter part

of the 18th. There are books on this history and some very good poems.

There's a critical touchstone for these poems, an essay titled Style and Structure in the Greater Romantic Lyrics,

published by M. H. Abrams a half century ago. Abrams describes a typical movement in the poems of the period,

that they often begin by setting a scene, from our point of view, the initiatory stirring of desire or disturbance.

Abrams observes that the poems then move inward, taking speaker and reader on a reflective journey,

a varied but integral process, he writes, of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling.

End quote. And that the poems tend to end where they began with some sense that,

on arrival, the place where they began with some sense that on arrival the place

where they began has been altered. Later critics would find a pattern of conflict, dealing with the

conflict, resolving the conflict way too pat. But some notion of disturbance are turned inward to explore

its source or meaning, and a reorientation toward it corresponds in interesting ways to the movement

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