ScholarWorks@경상국립대학교

초록

This essay offers an atmospheric reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” situating the poem within affect theory, phenomenology, and the environmental humanities. Drawing on Ben Anderson’s account of “affective atmospheres” as distributed and temporally modulating fields, it shifts attention from lyric interiority to the poem’s orchestration of ambient conditions—quiet, minimal motion, frosty night, and infant breath—that shape perception before reflection. Close readings of micro-sensory cues—the “fluttering” film, the nearly motionless flame, and the “secret ministry” of frost—show how Coleridge stages “silentness” as an active medium that reorganizes scale, activates memory through environmental resonance, and prepares the ethical imagination. The essay argues that the poem’s ethical orientation emerges from durational attunement—an ambient temporality through which cognition is punctuated and sustained by atmospheric rhythms. It concludes by proposing “atmospheric literacy” as a critical framework for understanding how Romantic attunement anticipates contemporary questions of attention, attachment, and ethical stance.

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