Coleridge poem on new Foreshore steps

An excerpt from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been chosen to be engraved into the new steps area on the Derwentwater Foreshore Project.

The words taken from the poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ have now been installed on the new foreshore steps.

More about Coleridge:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge the charismatic and hugely influential poet of the Romantic movement was born in 1772 and brought up initially as a country child in Devon. His father, John Coleridge, was the clergyman and schoolmaster at Ottery St Mary and Samuel was the youngest and much favoured son in a family of 10 children.

Like Wordsworth in Cumberland, Coleridge enjoyed the freedom to roam the countryside and play in the woods and meadows surrounding him. This happy rural existence came to an abrupt end when Coleridge was 9 years old; his father died and he was sent off to Christ's Hospital School near Clerkenwell in North London and just about abandoned there. School life was harsh and he hated the alien city environment.

Frost at Midnight

Years later in 1796, when his first son Hartley was born, Coleridge still remembered the effect of that city environment and vowed to give his child the freedom to enjoy nature.

He expressed these thoughts in his poem "Frost at Midnight" which was written during the winter of 1797-8. In the quiet of the cottage in Nether Stowey in Somerset, Coleridge sat in front of the fire at midnight with his precious child asleep in the crib at his feet. Remembering his childhood in the city he vows this child will be able to "wander like a breeze".

Within the next three years that promise was fulfilled. The Coleridge family moved to Greta Hall in Keswick to join their relatives the Southeys and to be close to the Wordsworths in Grasmere. As his father had promised the young Hartley was brought up in magnificent countryside surroundings near to the River Greta, with Derwentwater nearby and surrounded by a giants' encampment of mountains.

Hartley's reply to his father

By 1833 Hartley had published his own book of poems and the opening sonnet is dedicated to his father. It forms an appreciative reply to "Frost at Midnight" and acknowledges what Coleridge had attempted to do for his children.