Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the night" analysis

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night"

Robert Frost's poem, "Acquainted with the Night," employs a terse rima sonnet style, similar to a Shakespearean sonnet, which uses four tercets in an interlocking three-line rhyme strategy.

The first stanza of Frost's poem embraces a trinity, which has powerful spiritual and philosophical implications in all literature, especially in poetry. In this poem, Frost uses the number three to great advantage; in fact the noted poet employs three symbols that are important in every human's life. In the first line "night," arouses thoughts of darkness as juxtaposed to the preferred opposite, light. The second line offers "rain" - a pure form of water - which is of course vital to the survival of all forms of life. And in the third line the word "light," the opposite of darkness and in this context an important aspect of the poem.

Viewed philosophically, this opening stanza - and indeed the entire poem - has a certain aura of mystery about it. That is not too surprising; the author has been identified with embracing the literary tool of mystery by scholars like Keat Murray in Midwest Quarterly (Murray, 2000). Murray quotes Frost as saying, "I like anything that penetrates the mysteries. And if it penetrates straight to hell, then that's all right, too."

Were it not for the mysteries built into excellent poetry, readers' imaginations might be left in neutral. But in the case of "Acquainted with the Night," the mind has a myriad of ideas to explore and examine. But by "mysteries" this writer is not alluding to vagueness - but rather to a stimulation of the senses. An inquiry into the meaning of life and of time.

Murray believes that in this poem, Frost is "imaginatively" attempting to "penetrate the mystery of his own nature." The very first line sets an "inescapable mood," Murray writes, and induces the alert reader into a "...mythical conception of consciousness." Frost uses present-perfect tense to imply that the poet's persona has had - and still has - a close relationship with the night. Although when the reader digs further into the poem, the image of a city is presented (a city with a multitude of images and people), the first line lets the reader know there is a "lone consciousness" (Murray) that is withdrawn from normal daylight. The mystery, Murray continues, is in Frost's approach to "night." In the first line night is "ambivalent" because the poet is "somewhat detached from night" and yet at the same time the poet's persona is being drawn to night as a place where his emptiness and loneliness can be expressed.

And so, the mystery to the reader is in whether the speaker (poet) is comforted by the night or whether the poet is wallowing in desolation and the night presents a perfect venue for that morbid self-pity. Murray suggests that Frost is exploring a poetic concept that renowned psychologist Carl Jung has alluded to as "visionary." Jung meant that visionary literature provides the reader with material that delves in "a primordial experience," and that experience "...surpasses man's understanding." Hence, "night" is a kind of mysterious black hole, one can suspect, that could be seen as "formless and vague" (Murray). But in the second line, water (rain) offers the hope of life; and in the third, Murray continues, "The God-figure produces light in contrast to the vast chaos."

Another scholar, Kyoko Amano, suggests that the "night" is not as vague as Murray asserts it is; night likely reflects "the poet's own inner life, possibly self knowledge," Amano explains, quoting Kimberley H. Kidd. The poet's journey toward the night, his familiarity with the night, both represents the poet's search for "complete self-knowledge" and his willingness to explore unknown - again, mysterious - territory.

In the second stanza, Amano conjectures that Frost is putting the persona into the reader's consciousness in the form of a denial of others. The "watchman" is the only other human in this poem, of course, but beyond that, it may be that the speaker looks down rather than at the watchman because the speaker feels some guilt, or indifference. The watchman might be a timekeeper, as well, and the poet / speaker is reluctant to face the reality that his time is running out on this earth.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet / When far away an interrupted cry / Came over houses from another street..." Frost writes in the third stanza. That cry, it seems, as readers learn in the fourth stanza, is not to try to coax him into returning or showing courtesy; it is likely to show him that nothing will prevent him from discovering the new possibilities, Amano conjectures. Other scholars have written about this poem in the sense that it is really just Frost explaining that there are many choices one must make when preparing to write a poem. If that is true, and therein lies part of the mystery alluded to earlier, then the line "...an interrupted cry" might be Frost's image of creative writers who struggle to find originality and meaning in their poetry.

That suggestion having been covered, and even if Frost's poems are about the nature of poetry itself, when he writes of the "luminary clock against the sky" in the fourth stanza he is returning to the first line, as poems should do. Indeed, the night in the first line is juxtaposed to the moonlight shining down from that "clock" (phases of the moon are precise and relate to specific dates, hours and minutes). Murray contends that the moon "contrasts with darkness" and that fact adds another contrast to a poem that is already full of contrasts.