Coleridge's Frost at Midnight

In "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge places a dream within a daydream when he turns his thoughts back to a summer childhood in the second stanza. There the child-speaker looks out his classroom windown to long for the natural world outside so long that he is lulled into a hazy daydream of running about outside even as he sits at his desk, supposedly studying, inside the school. For one brief moment, this dream allowed the young Coleridge to escape the confines of the classroom, and it is to this escape that the adult Coleridge turns in his own moment of solemn introspection in the frosty winter midnight.