Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the night" poem analysis

Robert Frost poem "Acquainted with the night"

Robert Frost's Acquainted with the Night

One of the things that attract the reader to Frost's poetry is the particular sound and rhythm of his poems. As it is well-known, Frost was an advocate of the traditional style of verse. As such, he used form and rhyme along with the actual content of his poetry to convey meaning. Acquainted with the Night is especially significant for the analysis of the interaction between form and content, since it is composed as a sonnet. Although the poem is open to diverging readings, it is safe to say that the poet himself is the speaker and that the text describes a descent into the poet's own consciousness. Thus, the imagery as well as the form and rhythm of the poem interlock to ease the access of the reader to obscure regions of the consciousness that the poet describes in the text. In Frost's poem, the form and the rhythm play active roles in the interpretation by assisting the experience of the dim and mysterious realms of the subconscious.

The imagery of the poem is obviously symbolic: the all-blanketing night, the rain, the watchman, the distant cry in the street and the moon are roughly the main points of the description. The landscape is obviously not a natural but a mental one. The triple terza rima rhyme aba bcb cdc as well as the tertiary sonnet form hint at the symbolic, key-number three as a structuring element of the poem. The rhyme scheme moreover serves to create an interdependence of each stanza with the contiguous one. Although the poem follows the traditional sonnet form, what is interesting is that Frost uses this form in a modern way: he maintains the structure of the classical sonnet but he arranges the ideas in a peculiar way, without respecting for instance the use of the last two lines as explanatory for the rest of the text. The first lines of the poem are all disrupted by full stops, creating thus the impression of briefness but also fixing the atmosphere of the poem. The rhythm is thus at first brief and disrupted, then flowing and then disrupted once more in the end. The rhythm and the meter along with the symbolic imagery hint at the poet's journey beyond the immediate experience into the darkness of the subconscious. To be "acquainted with the night" is here obviously to have an experience of the darker and more profound regions of the human mind. All the images in the text indicate that the poet crosses the boundaries of consciousness, entering a world of veiled darkness, beyond the "furthest city light": "I have been one acquainted with the night. / I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain. / I have outwalked the furthest city light."(Frost, 8) The actual description in the poem suggests a nocturnal walk somewhere beyond the borders of an inhabited city. The poet thus symbolically goes past the watchman, "unwilling to explain," that is, refusing communication with the only other human character in the poem, and moves ahead without being deterred by the cry that came from another street. The imagery thus suggests a moving forward away from light, civilization and human companionship, deep into a darker world. The journey is thus evidently a descent into the poet's own self, somewhere beyond the immediate, everyday experience. Moreover, the use of the Present Perfect indicates the connection between the past and the present, hinting that the experience described in an ongoing process. This fact, together with the employment of the participial form "acquainted" indicates that the poet has not only traveled to the deeper regions of his own consciousness, but that he has also gained knowledge from the experience. The last lines of the poem are even more suggestive. The "luminary clock" is obviously the moon, the only source of light in the darkened landscape. The comparison of the moon to a clock that however tells the poet that the time is "neither wrong nor right" indicates that the speaker has gone beyond the relevance of time to human experience: "A luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. / I have been one acquainted with the night."(Frost, 9) Thus, form and content are interlocked in Frost's poem so as to create the atmosphere specific to the experience of the deeper layers of the self.