David Carlson Frost at Midnight 1.

What is the setting of the first stanza and how does the speaker feel about it? Cite textual evidence to support your answer. The inmates of my cottage have left me to that solitude and so calm that it disturbs and vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silentness. This takes place at night in a cottage in a heavily wooded area, perhaps near a sea. He is unnerved by how incredibly silent it is.

2. Identify a poetic device in the first stanza and explain how it affects tone. Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. He is likening the light off the fireplace grate to a living being, which is personification. This gives the stanza a light, charming perspective. 3. What is the setting of the second stanza and how does the speaker feel about it? The second stanza takes place in the speakers mind to when he was a school boy dozing off during his studies: How oft, at school, which most believing mind I dreamt of my sweet birth-place and the old church tower. It is evident that he didnt have the fondest memories of his school-hood, considering he only wanted to leave the school, looking at his books in mock study rather than interest. 4. Identify a poetic device in the second stanza and explain how it affects tone. and the old church-tower, whose bells stirred me, Falling on mine ear most like articulate sounds of things to come! He is using a metaphor for how sounds can drop upon ones ears, like a falling object. 5. What is the speaker saying about his child in the third stanza? About nature? The speaker is glad that his child will grow up in the countryside, unlike himself who was reared in the great city, pent mid cloisters dim. He is glorifying nature and degrading city life. For instance, he proclaims to his child, But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountain. This is very much so in line with Coleridges view. 6. Identify a poetic device in the third stanza and explain how it affects tone. But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze The speaker is inciting ideas of freedom and informality, using a simile. This especially emphasizes his views on nature.

7. Has the speaker changed in any way from the beginning of the poem to the end? If so, how? The speaker took a small emotional journey. He started being unnerved by his surroundings, amid the silence. At the end, however, his reaffirmation that nature is the root of goodness sets a change in his views. At this point, he imagines, The redbreast sit and sing betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of mossy apple-tree and has a newfound awe for the cold icicles and frost outside the cottage. 8. Select at least two principles of British Romanticism and discuss the extent to which this poem supports those principles or contradicts them. A prime component of British Romanticism is the idea of pastoral setting being superior t the urban. This is essentially the driving theme of stanza three, and plays host to the speakers catharsis he experiences. In that regard, the poem very much so supports Romanticism. In addition, the speaker tells of his disinterest in school, which follows the Romantic view of intuition over reason, though he doesnt delve to deep in this realm. Finally, the poem is written to be in-the-moment of thought of the speaker: The author uses words that incite spontaneity, such as his use of exclamations like Hark! and Tis calm indeed!. To contrast the immediacy of his lexicon, and structures, the poem takes a well-thought emotion journey throughout the speakers life. These conflicting ideas exhibit the Romantic idea of creating tension between spontaneity and labored composition in poems.