Young Eden
Tuesday
I got to hold my latest granddaughter for the first time yesterday as we visited my son and his family in Atlanta. Although it was a beautiful spring day, I thought of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” as I gazed at the sleeping child.
That’s because Coleridge meditates on how God will speak to his own infant child as he grows up. The “great universal teacher” works through nature—“the Frost performs its secret ministry”—and will communicate to young Hartley through the mountains, lakes, and clouds of the Lake District: “So shalt thou see and hear/ The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible/ Of that eternal language.”
This teacher teaches the spirit of inquiry and spiritual exploration. Or as Coleridge puts it, “he shall mold/Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.” This is exactly what I want for young Eden:
Here’s the second half of the poem:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mold
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
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.