taken for granted. The nineteenth century had
witnessed a growing middle class of literate peo-
ple who were increasingly fond of reading as a
form of evening family entertainment. People
living and working in cities longed for and ideal-
ized country life. After all, the increasingly over-
populated industrial urban centers reeked with
air and water pollution. People on Sundays or
holidays struck out of town on long walks into
the relatively fresher country air. Wordsworth
described walking trips along the Wye River
and visits to the popular ruins of Tintern
Abbey, the subject of one of his most famous
poems. He wrote about a single reaper and about
a little girl lost in a snowstorm. These poems
provided both the lens and focus that many
middle-class readers enjoyed and many subse-
quent writers were to emulate.
For example, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in
‘‘The Darkling Thrush’’ (1900) describes a per-
son alone in a natural landscape, a person who is
unable to connect with other people and who is
fearful about what lies ahead in the new century
but who is affected by the song of a single bird.
The setting and sentiments, and the language the
poet uses to convey them, are akin to several of
Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, published a cen-
tury earlier, and they anticipate Frost’s poetry
in general and ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ in
particular. In the United States among the late
nineteenth-century realists, readers can find
many instances of Wordsworth’s literary theory
illustrated in poetry. One example is Edwin
Arlington Robinson’s ‘‘Richard Cory’’ (1896),
which is written from the collective point of
view of the townspeople, who work through
their days cursing their bread and doing without
meat, who stand on the pavement and envy the
wealthy, handsome Richard Cory and cannot
understand how it is that a man like that who
has everything (from their point of view) could
‘‘put a bullet through his head.’’ Another exam-
ple can be drawn from any of the poems in Edgar
Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology(1915).
These 244 monologues are spoken from the
graves of former Spoon River residents. The
poems read like grave-marker epitaphs for ordi-
nary people who now, in death, can speak the
absolute truth of their lives. The work of Hardy
in England and Robinson and Masters in the
United States illustrate the realism that charac-
terized much late nineteenth-century poetry,
that depicted a world inhabited by ordinary peo-
ple dealing with the realities of their lives.
Depiction of ordinary experience written
in the language actually spoken by common
people produces poetry that is accessible to a
wide range of readers, but accessibility does not
disallow nuance. Read on a literal level, Frost’s
‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is easy to under-
stand: Paraphrased, one might say the poem is a
statement given by a lonely or alienated person
who takes a walk at night. But two words in the
poem might cause readers to think there is more
to this poem than its literal meaning. These
words are ‘‘acquainted’’ and ‘‘night.’’ The word
acquaintedhas several connotations: to be intro-
duced to; to have personal but partial knowledge
of; to have had social contact with; to be partially
familiar with. The word suggests a level of polite
encounter and a sense of limited exposure. The
word, ‘‘acquainted’’ describes the speaker’s con-
nection to ‘‘night.’’ Night is the time between dusk
and sunrise, the time of darkness, the time gener-
ally given to rest and sleep, the time in which
intimate couples may have sexual intercourse,
the time of being nestled down at home. In the
setting of this poem, night is the time during which
the speaker heads out of town alone. For the
speaker, nighttime is a period of feeling total iso-
lation and detachment from social groups, a time
of disconnection, lack of communication, and a
measure of vulnerability.
The wordnightdraws with it a constellation
of associations established by the countless ways it
has been used in literature across the centuries.
St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13:12, metaphorically
describes confronting the limitations of human
understanding as trying to see through a dark
glass. St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century
mystic, wrote about loneliness, desolation, and
loss of faith, calling it the dark night of the
human soul. Many poets have used images of
darkness and night to convey negative human
emotions, bad experiences, trouble, and death. In
Tennyson’s ‘‘Crossing the Bar’’ (1889), dying is
metaphorically described as voyaging out to sea
at night. In the poem, ‘‘Do Not Go Gentle into
that Good Night’’ (1951), Welsh poet Dylan Tho-
mas urges those who face imminent death to resist
the inevitable by getting angry and fighting back.
Everyone experiences nighttime, knows what it
is to be startled in the night, knows what it is to
stumble in the dark, and knows what it is to have
restless thoughts about daytime troubles that
prevent sleep. Because it is universally experienced,
night provides a vehicle, a way of understanding,
certain mental states that may otherwise beAcquainted with the Night