The audiences put into Coleridge's early poems are often friends and family, as we have seen. The angle of address to the audiences for later works is often educative – as is suggested by the subtitles of many of them: The Friend; a series of essays in three volumes; to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals and religion, with literary amusements interspersed, or Aids to Reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality and religion. These speak for a pedagogic rather than a didactic concern, an ideal pedagogy which in the 1790s was to be shared with Wordsworth: ‘what we have loved | Others will love, and we will teach them how’, as the latter writes (P. XIII. 444–5). Criticizing Wordsworth in 1817 with the assertion that rural life and labour are not sufficient in themselves, Coleridge writes that ‘Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant’ (BL ii. 45). In ‘Frost at Midnight’, another of the ‘conversation poems'of the 1790s, the deficiencies of the poet's education, as he remembers it, are to be remedied by the child's future.

The poem begins in a setting in which all is quiet potential. It rises to a climax in which ‘abstruser musings’ and the initial setting they apparently suited are enlivened by natural transformation. We as readers are the audience for what it is insisted is not conversation but are rather silent and solitary musings; then in the second half of the poem a similarly dynamic transformation of the speaker's child is promised, enrolling him in a new community. It is not that the speaker is unaware of this energy – a natural ‘secret ministry’ is insisted on at the start – but that he moves from observer to participant and beneficiary. Initially all the activity of nature is ‘inaudible as dreams’, though a nature which is immanent and apparently inactive still takes priority over the community: ‘Sea, hill and wood | This populous village!;’

The film which flutters and flickers on the grate of a low fire becomes an emblem at first of an idle and egotistical spirit and then of a dreamed of community.