`The Secret Ministry of Cold'

Sometimes the most valuable service a middling writer can perform is to lead us to the work of a more gifted writer, as when I came to Faulkner by way of Sherwood Anderson and to Baudelaire from Poe. In the summer of 1971, in the long-gone Publix Bookmart in Cleveland, I bought a recently published paperback of The Testing Tree by Stanley Kunitz (whom I came to by way of Theodore Roethke, thus bolstering my theory). After leaving the bookstore I walked to the Greyhound station and caught a bus for Youngstown (after a stop next door at Hernando’s Hideaway). Today, I can’t imagine what I saw in Kunitz’s poems. The early “neo-metaphysical” work is mannered and dull; the late poems are slack and sentimental. “Journal for My Daughter” falls into the latter category, but on the bus it grabbed me for reasons I can no longer remember. Here is the poem’s eighth and final section:

“The night when Coleridge,
heavy-hearted,
bore his crying child outside,
he noted
that those brimming eyes
caught the reflection
of the starry sky,
and each suspended tear
made a sparkling moon.”

I didn’t know the source of the Coleridge anecdote, but it was enough to get me interested in reading more than the “greatest hits” I knew from high school. As I read more deeply, I came to associate the story in Kunitz’s poem with “Frost at Midnight,” the greatest of Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” In it, the poet sits by the fire with his sleeping infant son, Hartley, beside him. Unlike the Kunitz version, in Coleridge’s poem the father and child remain indoors (to do otherwise in February constitutes child abuse), nor is there mention of reflecting eyes. In the final lines, however, the moon makes its appearance:

“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 eave-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.”

The poem is sublime, of course, but that’s where the Kunitz-Coleridge linkage remained in my mind until I read Early Visions, 1772-1804, the first volume of Richard Holmes’ magisterial biography of Coleridge. In it, he explains that the version of “Frost at Midnight” we know is the product of a decade’s tinkering by its author, resulting in what Holmes calls “many alterations and refinements.” The original version, however, from 1798, “gives a more touching picture,” Holmes says. Here is the conclusion of the original poem:

“Or whether the secret ministry of cold
shall hang them up in silent icicles,
quietly shining to the quiet moon;
like those, my babe! which ere tomorrow's warmth
Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,
Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty
Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout
And stretch and flutter from thy mother's arms,
As thou would'st fly for very eagerness.”

Now Hartley’s mother, Sara, enters the picture, as do the baby’s eyes reflecting drops from the melting icicles. And the moon. I’m not convinced this is Kunitz’s source for his own poem about a child. Perhaps a closer reader of Coleridge’s voluminous poetry and prose, or one more familiar than I with Kunitz’s work, can suggest the true source. My point is that Kunitz, 37 years ago on a Greyhound bus bound for Youngstown, inadvertently inspired my love of Coleridge – particularly his prose – and for that I’m grateful. This story is circuitous and incomplete, I know, as most good stories are, but that reminds me of Laurence Sterne, whom Coleridge in a lecture ranked with Rabelais as “the great writers of wit and humour.” What follows is a gloss on the post you are reading and on what this blog often attempts to do, and it comes is from Tristram Shandy:

“For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can by no means avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave:
Traditions to shift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that: -- All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from.”