It is a common hope in the lives of parents that their children can move on and live more successful lives. That their children will learn the lessons their parents taught them and the path their parents have blazed to lead them to a more promising future. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem “The Frost at Midnight,” we see the hopeful parent theme in Coleridge's use of opposites, context, and word choice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Even within the title we immediately see literary archetypes at work. Frost is a natural phenomenon that works rather slowly, has a tendency to kill living things and usually works only at night or, better said, at the end of the day. Frost's definition in this sense can be almost exactly exchanged for death if we formally personify it as Death. Death is a natural thing, death tends to end a person's life, and death usually takes its time and comes at the end of life. So the very first word in the title of the poem suggests death. The second part of the title names a truly unique moment of the day. In all the minutes and hours of the day Coleridge chooses the exact minute when one day dies and a new one begins. So the title alludes to the fact that Death is coming and it's the end of a day, or someone's day. We're not sure who exactly it is from the title, but the context gives us more about who it ended up being. In the fourth line of Coleridge's poem the speaker points out to the reader that the "residents" of his cottage are all at rest, except the speaker who addresses himself in the fifth line. The only other family member the speaker names in the poem is their child. So through context it is obvious who the two important characters are within this poem. This is important because it is clear that the infant is specifically the speaker, which means he is a later generation. The infant is only mentioned once more in detail until line forty-four. At line forty-four the poem becomes a letter full of optimism. The language used to describe the sleeping child becomes words of softness and fragility in contrast to the images at the beginning of the poem and the previous stanza. At the beginning of the poem the author talks about extreme silence but notes that the dying fire is sociable and that he understands and sympathizes with him. The speaker talks in the next stanza about being stuck behind bars and about elements of the speaker's childhood that "haunted him" (line 31), and "so I brooded all the next morning" (line 36), and the lines thirty-nine through line forty-three suggests that the speaker was anxiously waiting for someone who never arrived. The entire focus of this stanza and the specific choice of words allows Coleridge to give the reader a certain level of anxiety. Starting from line forty-five we see words like “gentle” and “deep calm” and immediately the reader is brought back to this level of tranquility. We see for the first time that this is a message of hope for the speaker's child. with line forty-eight where the speaker says, “My little girl is so beautiful! it makes my heart vibrate / with tender joy, looking at you like this, / and thinking that you will learn many other traditions / and in distant other spaces! For I was raised / in the big city, secluded amid dark cloisters…” At this point it makes sense to the reader that all that led up to this stanza was the speaker essentially saying at length that he regretted being grew up in.