Compare and contrast Joanna Baillie's poem 'A Mother to her Waking Infant" (Anthology 54) with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'Frost at Midnight" (Anthology 181).
AZS210 Approaching Literature
Name: Eliasarah Marzat TMA03
Compare and contrast Joanna Baillie’s poem ‘A Mother to her Waking Infant” (Anthology 54) with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight” (Anthology 181). Discuss and compare the form and content of the two poems, then say which poem you prefer and why.
Romantic poets, Joanna Baillie and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote both the two poems, ‘A Mother to her Waking Infant‘ and ’Frost at Midnight’ respectively in the late eighteenth century. In this essay we will examine both poems, compare and contrast the form and contents of the two poems and finally, I will discuss about the poem I prefer and why it appeals to me.
Between the two poems, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is the more complex of the two poems. The poet looks into both the past and present, he imagines the future of his child and hopes that it would be better than his own. The poem is set in the cold, winter night. The poet is sitting up along at night while everyone else has left him to his solitude except for his baby at his side. This poem is structured in a Romantic verse monologue. This is evident in the use of blank verses, unrhymed and an in iambic pentameter. The poem is framed with the image of frost in the beginning and the end of the poem. The use of frost represents both an imagination as well as the image of cold and frozen as apposed to feeling and warmth. The poem also creates a sense of calmness and solitude in the surroundings of the poem, in contrast to his inner feelings, which is filled with mixed emotions. His surrounding is described as ‘the sole unquiet thing’, as appose to his inner feelings of his son’s future as he compares it to his own childhood. As with the Romantic theme, nature was one of the central issues in the poem and this can be seen in the last stanza where all of the seasons are used, and he ends and begins with icicles. The poet believes in the learning through nature, unlike his own childhood education, which was formal. When he speaks of his son, the language use if more informal and pleasant. He is able to set aside his unhappiness of his formal education with the thoughts of his son who will ‘learn from lore, And in far other scenes!’ The poet was brought up in the city ‘pent ‘mid cloisters dim, And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars’, in contrast to his son who will ‘wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shore.’ Instead of having a ‘stern preceptor’ his son will be taught by the ‘Great universal Teacher!’
