Frost's "Acquainted with the Night": Form, Solitude, Allegory

Introduction: An Unusual Sonnet

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" is not a traditional sonnet. Although it has the traditional fourteen lines and tightly rhymed stanzas associated with both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, Frost's rhyme scheme here is unusual: he uses the interlinking rhymes structured around successive tercets known as terza rima, whose greatest proponent was probably Dante in The Divine Comedy. Frost takes the radical solitude of Dante — who, bereft of Beatrice, is led by the ghost of Virgil into a sort of dream-vision of eternity — and offers no otherworldly way out. This paper argues that Frost pursues a strategy in "Acquainted with the Night" of using mundane, realistic details suitable for a poem about observed life, and makes them feel less familiar — through the formality of the verse — until he has transfigured the world he walks through, making it seem like an allegorical hellscape, or a perfect exterior symbol of the poet's interior state. Each stanza will be examined individually to show how Frost's literary art constructs a universal-seeming situation out of naturalistic description.

The First Stanza: Solitude and Anaphora

Deirdre Fagan notes that Frost's narrator in "Acquainted with the Night" is "uncharacteristically urban" (Fagan 22), although the first stanza insists on evoking that urban landscape purely to leave it behind in wandering: "I have outwalked the furthest city light" (Frost 255, l. 3). Yet the first line already gives a clue to Frost's larger purposes. The poem opens: "I have been one acquainted with the night" (Frost 255, l. 1). What is the word "one" doing in the middle of this sentence? The line loses no grammatical meaning if the word is omitted — "I have been acquainted" preserves the sense entirely. Even the damage done to the iambic pentameter could be repaired with another choice: "I have been well acquainted" or "I have been long acquainted." The introduction of "one" instead lays emphasis on the solitary nature of the poem's speaker and introduces an almost archaic note to the grammar. In ordinary speech, this kind of verbal construction would seem pretentious, but here it lends a slow gravity to the poem's opening, especially as the biggest word in the line — "acquainted" — chimes with the double use of "rain" in the following line. This lands with additional emphasis on the ear because "rain" is the last word of line 2, and will therefore, according to the terza rima scheme, be picked up twice again in the next stanza.

The first stanza also asserts an unworldly quality — as though the "city" (l. 3) that the poem is "outwalking" is itself merely a physical reality that can be transcended — through the use of almost-Biblical anaphora: "I have been one" (l. 1), "I have walked" (l. 2), "I have outwalked" (l. 3). As though to blur the break between stanzas, this anaphora continues in the second stanza — "I have looked" (l. 4), "I have passed" (l. 5) — and reaches its final structural position at the opening of the third stanza: "I have stood still" (l. 7). The anaphora is used as a structural principle throughout, and it brings a somnolent or dreamy quality to the narrator's voice. The events described could just as easily constitute a dream-vision of the sort Dante invented terza rima to narrate. Although it may seem bold to compare one of the great epic poems to Frost's considerably humbler sonnet, Richard Poirier argues — agreeing with both Jarrell and Brower, who had earlier discussed the indebtedness — that "Acquainted with the Night" is a poem that "links Frost with Dante" (Poirier 241).

It is curious that, as Frost's terza rima continues, the landscape takes on the allegorical quality of a Dantesque vision. Although the midnight strolls of the first stanza indicate darkness and solitude — the poet walking in rain, then "outwalking" the "furthest city light" — the second stanza reveals that the "saddest city lane" is still visible to him. Fagan usefully points out the ambiguity in this phrase: "the question is whether the sadness is inherent in the lane or is the perception of the speaker" (Fagan 22). The two seem indistinguishable. One of the things that makes the poem feel like the narration of a dream — or nightmare — is the perfect congruence between the poet's inner state and the visible world he describes. In part, this results from the poet's inability to connect with the other figures in the landscape: although he encounters at least one identifiable person — the "watchman on his beat" (l. 5) — the poet "dropped his eyes, unwilling to explain." Fagan suggests that "night for Frost represents the innermost loneliness, a loneliness that keeps him isolated from those who cry out, but not for him, and from the watchman, who may or may not be aware of his presence" (Fagan 22). Yet the next two stanzas present further calls from the human population, causing the poet to stop "the sound of feet / when…an interrupted cry / Came over houses from another street" — the possible sound of distress prompts an instinctive reaction even in this solitary wanderer.

Conclusion: Acquaintanceship with the Night

The poem concludes with a couplet that provides a formal ending, but the formality is doubled by Frost's use of the ultimate in anaphoretic repetition: the first line of the poem is repeated as the last. Most sonnets have a concluding couplet that poses a complete thought. Frost's does, but in a way that is as disjunctive as the other rhetorical devices he employs throughout. The repetition of the opening line puts heavy emphasis on its curious phrasing and asks us to evaluate it a second time, wondering whether "acquainted with the night" might be metaphorical — an image expressing the poet's sense that he has had direct knowledge of the universe's indifference to human emotion.

Deirdre Fagan quotes Cunningham's summary of the poem, stating that "one does well in Frost's universe to be acquainted with the night, to know what it is like, but values and meanings are existential in the one who carries out his errands and keeps his promises. They are not transcendental" (Fagan 23). This is a slightly more optimistic reading of the closing lines than the poem seems to warrant. Frost seems more likely to be expressing his melancholy insight that acquaintanceship with the darkest truths of existence is something that should never become more intimate than mere acquaintanceship. Frost knows the nature of the universe by reputation, and that is enough for him to maintain a kind of permanent aloofness.

Works Cited

Fagan, Deirdre. Critical Companion to Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Print.

Frost, Robert. The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, 1979. Print.

Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print.