Today is the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and so I post this excerpt from one of his poems, Frost at Midnight. Coleridge’s better-known works include the innovative yet strange (one might even say alarming) poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, but I chose one that reveals another side of this unhappy, troubled, brilliant man: a tender-hearted and optimistic poem written while caring for his new infant son Hartley. Clearly he anticipates a loftier path for Hartley than the one he has followed himself.

Accompanying it is a detail from a larger painting.

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed 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 shall 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.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge