The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb

nor does he use the particular experience merely as a point of departure for a public discourse. He rather invites the reader to share a unique experience, and it is this which determines the form of his poem. We are presented not with a rationally ordered sequence, but with a psychologically ordered movement of consciousness. Consider, for example, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, which presents us with the poet's reverie as he sits alone in his cottage at night, gazing at his fire over which flits that mysterious film known as a 'stranger.' As Humphrey House has pointed out,2 the stages of the reverie are initiated and, so to speak, anchored by related concrete images from which the speaker's thoughts move and to which they return. From these images, fixed in time and space, his mind moves backward and forward in time, out in space, circling and returning. The result of this is to make the poem not an account of what was thought, but a rendering of the total experience of which the thinking was a part. It is not exposition but psychological drama. The poem does not, however, present us simply with a slice of experience, a fragment of a stream of consciousness. It is completely self-contained, unified within itself. This is partly, of course, the result of the relationship between the different parts of the reverie, the contrast between the speaker's memories of his own past and his hopes for his son's future. But it is even more the result of the images forming the initial dramatic situation. These do more than provide points of initiation and return. The night, the cold, the fire, the child in his cradle-these are in themselves a unified group by virtue of their relationship in time and space. And they give to the poem an objective and physical as well as subjective and mental coherence. Moreover, this group of concrete images is not only related to the reverie in that they constitute a physical setting which contains the thought, and in that they provide the transitions between its different stages; they are also, in a Coleridgean sense, symbols of the thought. The opening and closing lines of the poem describe the still night: The Frost performs its secret ministry Unhelped by any wind ... a Coleridge, The Clark Lectures 1951-52 (London, 1953), pp. 78-83. 138 The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb This content downloaded from 157.55.39.149 on Sat, 09 Jul 2016 05:16:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. But the lines qualitatively apply also to the stasis in which the reverie begins and ends. The central image of the film on the grate which flutters there, the sole unquiet thing mirrors the fluttering thought. The visible and the mental, the objective and the subjective, melt into each other and it is impossible to draw any sharp line between them. All this, of course, is part of what Coleridge meant by 'organic' form and is a common characteristic of many of his poems and of many of Wordsworth's. What has not been sufficiently noticed is the extent to which it is also characteristic of

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