Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, June 18, 2025.

Today's poem is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the seminal romantic poets.

And the poem is called Frost at Midnight. It's a long one,

so bear with me, but it's absolutely lovely. It is this poem of memory of a man who's recalling

his own childhood days and school days, the trials and angsts of those times.

And then we arrive at the present when he's holding his own young child in his arms

and imagining the ways in which life will be different for that child.

It's a love letter to the sublime beauties of nature.

It's a touching portrait of fatherhood. This poem has it all. Here is Frost at Midnight by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Frost performs its secret ministry, unhelped 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. See, 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 great, still flutters there, the sole, unquiet thing.

Methinks its motion in this hush of nature gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

making it a companionable form, whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spirit by its own moods

interprets, everywhere echo or mirror seeking of itself,

and makes a toy of thought.

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