I’ve read quite a few great poems in the past several months, but my favorite, the one that stuck to my ribs, is an oldie: “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Read it, then come back here so we can discuss.)
I don’t think I’d ever read this poem, despite taking several classes that assigned Coleridge’s poetry in undergrad. To be honest, most of what I remember about Coleridge is that he took drugs (true?) and wrote Kubla Khan but came out of his stupor before he was able to see it through, he was William Wordsworth’s cool friend, an aphorism about words in their best order, and “the star-dogged Moon” and symbolism from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
“Frost at Midnight,” less fantastical, more domestic, is much more interesting to me now, as someone steeped much more in homelife than fantasy. This is a parenting poem, a poem that does that thing parents want and progeny dread: hoping children will live the life they were unable to. It’s a poem written from inside, by a fire, with a baby sleeping. If autobiographical, then, a stolen poem: up with the baby, Coleridge writes. It’s also a poem of the natural world, and for its time, the suburban world. The speaker laments growing up in the city and insists his child “shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds … .” This is a 19th-century version a new or non-parent’s “My child won’t sit in front of a screen all day.”
Enter anxiety. The only thing stirring is a flame: “‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.”
My reading is colored by how the poem came to me—through Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a memoir about the first year or so of motherhood. In it, she admits to having always loved the poem but never having noticed the baby in it. (This is a testament to the ways musical language, rhythm and rhyme, can hide meaning without a closer look. See: every pop song you sing along to until one day you realize the lyrics are awful.) After becoming a parent, she did see it. Here is some of what she has to say:
It is a poem about sitting still, about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind. … These memories arouse in [the speaker] the profoundest feelings of love for his child, as if every separation he has endured in his life can be mended by this moment of their closeness. … This love is a restitution; it is like a new place, from which the old country, the unhappy past, can safely be viewed. … Coleridge does not mention nappies, noise, bits of old food. I don’t think this is just because it’s the night shift. His poem is written in the present tense; it describes a moment, surrounded, by implication, by other moments, by noise and disarray. Perhaps moments, now, are all there is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. … In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness.
As her reader, the baby is the first thing I saw, it’s where she pointed me.
Oh, but the second thing. The second thing pleases me to no end. Here it goes.
One of my favorite living poets is Mary Ruefle. A recent book of hers is Trances of the Blast. Reading the book in 2013, I kept wondering at that title.
“Trances of the blast.” Which, what does that even mean? I disliked the title but wanted not to dislike it, to know what was there.
I looked up trances, and it meant only what I thought it did: a state of being entranced, sleep-like, hypnotized. “Sleep-like states of the blast.” I know being literal doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does.
Could it mean what resounds?
Then here, 5 years after reading the Ruefle book, I came across this poem somewhere else, totally by accident, and for hours one afternoon I remained in a pleasant trance of the blast. There was the phrase in its original context, and I’m not quite sure I understand the image fully, but it was literal.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,Whether the summer clothe the general earthWith greenness, or the redbreast sit and singBetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branchOf mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatchSmokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fallHeard only in the trances of the blast,Or if the secret ministry of frostShall hang them up in silent icicles,Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Whether those eave-drops that have collected fall and last as long as the trances of the blast—perhaps the ripples in a puddle, perhaps the silence after the blast of a drop hitting the ground and splitting or whether they coalesce with coldness by the hand of that “secret ministry of frost” who could “… hang them up in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”
(“Quietly shining to the quiet Moon” may be one of my favorite lines in the English language. To me, Coleridge is a poet of great moons.)
The blast is maybe what happens if the eave-drops (here, actual droplets from the eave of a building) hit the puddle or the ground below. To call a single drop hitting the ground a “blast” must speak to how quiet the night must feel to this speaker, or how sensitive the speaker is, how attuned. The trance though—is it the aftermath? The quiet after the boom? That “reflection in tranquility” business his friend Wordsworth prattled on about? In that case, this drop is a literal “spontaneous overflow.” Each poem a trance in the after-blast of a reading life or some other event? Or is it the trancelike state the speaker would be in, staring at it, all night up with the baby, unless of course, that “secret ministry of frost” uses its coldness to freeze it.
And it’s fun to think of added modern meanings: blast in all its strength, sure, but also as in an email blast. (Actually, the trancelike state after receiving email blasts makes a lot of sense.) Or better yet, having a blast, the trance we’re drawn into having fun. To blast to destroy, as with dynamite and the catatonic state that might surround it. But I’m most drawn to the sonic meaning, most likely because of a talk Ruefle gave on tone earlier this year. She talked mostly about bells, yes, bells (hell’s bells, to get specific). She quoted Basho: “Coolness / the sound of a bell / leaving the bell.” Trances of the blast.
And of course, the blast of Coleridge’s work, of the Romantics, and the trances we’ve found ourselves in since, especially as poets. Maybe it is that Ruefle’s trance is one of awe and absorption. Maybe that word, part of trance’s definition, a state of absorption is it—having fallen from the roof, a drop blasts on the ground and is ultimately absorbed.
Then the third thing, much less domestic, back to that wild world Coleridge so often seemed more entranced and absorbed by: the sublime, the otherworldly, grandiose nature. (Okay, I do remember some stuff about Coleridge.)
In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind*, Suzuki Roshi offered the metaphor of a waterfall—much more dramatic than a drop or two from an eave, but, I think, related. He said that visiting Yosemite he saw a massive waterfall, and it caused him to think about how as the river the water is one whole. As it falls, it separates into groups, drops, and spray—when it is separate, set apart, we notice it, it causes feelings and appears (and even feels) different. The waterfall, he argues, is akin to individual lives. “It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. … Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. … Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing.” Eventually, the waterfall joins the river below, no longer separate entities, in many ways the same as it just was but now indistinguishable, less intense, less alone, a trance of a blast.
In Ruefle’s book, from the poem “Saga”:
Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging—crushed
and sparkling—in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.
My final thought for now: Such joy in not understanding a thing then receiving a little understanding sideways, years later, even if incomplete (especially, maybe, then). The initial impact, the release, the return: to more trances of the blast. (You know I couldn’t resist.)
What is a thing you read and didn’t understand, then came to understand newly a lot later? Let me know in the comments below.
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*Which I just recently learned about and have yet to read. I heard this waterfall anecdote on a podcast, driving, at a time when it was helpful to me.
