'Frost at Midnight' and the Poetry of Periphrasis

Coleridge's poem is here read as the text of an oblique theophany. The self-binding and simultaneity of frost is enacted in a diction characterised by a dense interlace of verbal echoes and by a rhythm of alternation in three aspects: contraction-expansion in perspective; linguistic register; and poetic mode. The style thus launched is later imitated largely in abstraction from its sacramental animation of all things, the exception being Hopkins, whose 'inscape' it prefigures. Coleridge's 'poetry of search' mutates with twentieth-century modernism into a 'poetry of statement' in which resonant image and textual allusion are free of the need to be realistically circumstantiated and which its readers are free to interpret with or against the grain of any periphrastic theology it might portend.