`What We Actually Became'

As the anniversary of his son’s death was approaching, a friend was reading Coleridge and sent me a stanza from “Frost at Midnight”:

“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 night-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.”

Any effort to know my friend’s loss is futile and arrogant, an exercise like squaring the circle. One cannot imagine the death of a child – absence, vacuum, nullity. Coleridge sits before the fire in his parlor at Stowey, February 1798. He recalls his own childhood and imagines a future for his son, Hartley. For once, Coleridge keeps his gassiness in check. Every parent will recognize the mingling of personal past and speculative future. The poem’s emotional tension, from sadness to joyousness, is almost unbearable. My friend writes:   

“The only Romantic poet I read regularly is Keats. These few lines by Coleridge though move me immensely. God, `the secret ministry of frost’: who wouldn’t want to have written these words. And who wouldn’t wish all seasons to be sweet for one’s sleeping infant son?”

Certainly this is Coleridge’s finest moment as a poet, when he permitted himself to be a father and a man like other fathers and men, not a bloviating bore. These lines nearly redeem him. My friend acknowledges that Coleridge’s hopes for his son would remain largely unfulfilled. Hartley, he observes, would become “a rather feckless fellow,” and then continues:

“I sometimes wonder how any of us, certainly me, could bear to look the shades of our parents in their speculationless eyes, distilling in the alembic of our imaginations the chasm between what they hoped for us when we were sleeping infants and what we actually became. I know, of course, in a lot of ways we became just like them. We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves—or on our parents.”

A rather dull poet, Stanley Kunitz, alludes to Coleridge’s poem, almost replicating his middle-of-the-night experience with Hartley, in “Journal for My Daughter” (The Testing Tree, 1971):

“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.”