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This paper investigates Coleridge’s theory of the symbol, which can be understood to be the consummation of his linguistic, philosophical, and religious thinking. The paper applies modern speculation about ‘things’ to studying Coleridge’s uniting of words and things in the symbol. His conception of ‘words-as-things’ was an attempt to bridge the widening gap between words and the world in his day. This article gives a particular focus on his great poem “Frost at Midnight,” in which clouds as symbolic signs “image” (or reflect) the forms of nature in the eyes of the poet’s son. The “bulk” of the clouds attests to the materiality of the symbol, and an obvious difference between the clouds and the natural objects they appear to resemble represents the translucence of the relation between signifier and signified in the symbol. Coleridge also describes this signifying relation as consubstantial, a term indicating that his symbolist theory is grounded in his theological reflection. The “eternal language” of God (i.e. Logos) that the child directly hears in the poem, which consists of symbols, reveals itself to have been thingified as the natural world. The performance of the frost makes the poet recognize the linguistic construction of the physical world and stirs his imagination to create a symbol revealing the thingness of its referent.
