Analysis

Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night is a description of a speaker wandering

through the night, trying to escape the isolation and depression he has encountered in his
daily life.
The “acquainted” used in the title sums up the relationship between the poem’s
subject and the night. The word shows that the two acknowledge each other, but implies
some embarrassment and an awkward relationship. The night seems to be attached to the
speaker, who cannot get alone time. The speaker is forced to accompany the loneliness,
something that is inevitable. This relationship is paralleled by the irony of an urban setting.
Cities are often centers of social and intellectual life, yet in his poem Frost portrays the urban
setting as empty and lonely. These two aspects, which are present throughout the poem, help
establish Frost’s desolate and negative tone.
In the first stanza, the helpless feeling is made immediately evident. In line 3, the
speaker “[outwalks] the furthest city lamp”. Here, Frost, by contrasting the streetlamp with
the desolate darkness, enhances the difference between the two and creates a feeling of being
beyond hopelessness. The light, representing day, meaning, and happiness, becomes
unattainable. The lack of hope is associated with the speaker’s sense of solitude: Frost repeats
“I” at the beginning of stanzas and further creates a methodical, drone tone with the speaker
walking “out in rain – and back in rain”. The rain, additionally, symbolizes the rhythmic and
inevitable downpour of sorrow. However, water also has a cleansing effect. By using rain,
Frost seems to imply that the desolation and isolation has become a welcome effect as the
speaker in unable to avoid it.
The speaker’s reluctance to acknowledge the “watchman on his beat” shows that
though the speaker needs interaction, he is unable to reach out for help. Because humans are
innately social animals, this shows that something is wrong with him and, on a broader scale,
humanity in general. The failure of the watchman to reach out to one who clearly is in need,
Frost criticizes society’s tendency to overlook peers.
Lines 7-9 are full of backwards syntax and sound imagery. Instead of stopping before
hearing a call, the speaker is able to anticipate the call and stops before it. The “interrupted
cry would also make much more sense as a cry that interrupts the speaker’s lonely stroll. This
irregular syntax shows the irregularity of the world Frost portrays, in which things are
unpredictable. The use of sound in the stanza (footsteps and the cry) and the physical distance
(“far away” and “another street”) of the speaker draw attention to the expanse and silence of
the surroundings. That he cannot find help from anyone else accentuates his emotional
distance from others.
The mention but ambiguity of time in the next stanza serves as an indication to the
inevitability of immense sorrow, as it can be unexpected and last for an indefinite length of
time. Furthermore, the moon’s being “against” the sky rather than “in” the sky as generally
used shows that the end exists, but is unattainable. This limit of height, along with the
vagueness of the time, contributes to the feeling of hopelessness as even simple questions
cannot be answered and visible goals cannot be achieved.
Frost uses a regular, terza rima rhyme scheme (ABABCBCDCDADAA), iambic
pentameter, sonnet format and repetition to show the cyclic nature of sorrow. The structured,
methodical flow of the poem connects the stanzas and mirrors the regularity and
inescapability of the cycle of sorrow. Iambic pentameter’s steady stressed and unstressed
syllables are similar to the footsteps of the speaker as he moves through the silence. The
repetition of used in the title, “in rain” in line 2, “I” in the first two stanzas and circular rhyme
show the cyclic, slow flow associated with loneliness. The repetition also shows the lack of
excitement and joy in the speaker’s life.
Finally, Frost uses punctuation to show the solitude and depression the subject feels.
In the first few and last stanzas, the short sentences show frustration and disappointment,
allowing time for the reader to sigh between lines. In the other stanzas, the enjambment used
pushes the poem along, implying the inability of the speaker to escape the solitude in which
he is trapped.
The poem is most often read as the poet/narrator's admission of having experienced
depression and a vivid description of what that experience feels like. In this particular reading
of the poem, "the night" is the depression itself, and the narrator describes how he views the
world around him in this state of mind. Although he is in a city, he feels completely isolated
from everything around him.

The poem is written in strict iambic pentameter, with 14 lines like a sonnet, and with a terza
rima rhyme scheme, which follows the complex pattern, aba bcb cdc dad aa. Terza rima
("third rhyme") was invented by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri for his epic poem The Divine
Comedy. Because Italian is a language in which many words have vowel endings, terza rima
is much less difficult to write in Italian than it is in English. Because of its difficulty, very
few writers in English have attempted the form. However, Frost was a master of many forms,
and "Acquainted With The Night" is one of the most famous examples of an American poem
written in terza rima.