hard to describe. The literal night is equated with
depression or loneliness oralienation. It is equated
with the absolute blackness of the closed grave.
The totality of literary uses of a given word
may be to some greater or lesser degree sug-
gested in any one literary instance in which the
word occurs. These associations give the word in
its immediate usage a layered meaning or sug-
gestiveness. Implicit in Frost’s use of night are
these other uses of it. But in this poem Frost does
something quite unusual: He links this evocative
and potentially scary word with the restrained,
social concept delivered in ‘‘acquainted.’’ The
speaker in ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ has
some knowledge of darkness, of loneliness, of
loss of faith. The speaker has been introduced
to trouble, to the limits of human understanding,
to the questions that have no easy answers.
While complacent others stay home, snug in
their beds, the speaker walks out beyond the
streetlights into the darkness. He is engulfed by
it. The suggestion is that in this time and place he
confronts the unanswered questions, his own
littleness, his detachment from others, perhaps
even the dark night of his human soul. He does
not live in the darkness, but he has been
introduced to it. He knows the daytime of social
interaction, but he is acquainted also with lone-
liness, depression, and insomnia.
Understanding a poem requires readers to
consider the literary context in which the poem
exists, to check definitions of the words used in
the poem, and to identify the elements that
convey this particular poem’s meaning. In
these ways, readers come to appreciate what
the poet has accomplished. Personally, they
may also come to understand something about
their own experience that they had not yet con-
sciously considered. In ‘‘Acquainted with the
Night,’’ Robert Frost gives readers a depiction
of a frame of mind or emotional state most
individuals experience at least some of the
time. The universality of the poem is delivered
through the way its particular features are
handled; its success is measured in the degree
to which it increases readers’ understanding of
this aspect of the human condition.
Source:Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘Acquainted
with the Night,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2010.Kyoko Amano
In the following essay, Amano asserts that
‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is about the process
of writing poetry
In Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing,
Richard Poirier suggests that Robert Frost’s
poems are often about the poet’s process—the
choices he has to make—in writing a poem. Poi-
rier writes, ‘‘The Frost of the best-loved poems is
also the Frost who is simultaneously meditating,
in a manner often unavailable to the casual reader,
on the nature of poetry itself.’’ Poirier uses ‘‘Stop-
ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’’ and ‘‘Mend-
ing Wall’’ as examples and points out that the
human dilemmas seen in these poems are ‘‘poetic
ones’’ (7). ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ similarly,
is a poem that exemplifies Poirier’s suggestion that
Frost’s poems are about writing poems.
The journey motif in this poem asks its read-
ers to analyze the allegorical aspects of the poem.
Kimberley H. Kidd, for example, suggests that
the night in the poem represents ‘‘the poet’s own
inner life, possibly self knowledge’’ and that the
poet ‘‘is acquainted but does not know’’ his inner
self well. Kidd maintains, ‘‘The poet’s journey
into the night, then, can be seen as ongoing and
continual, progressing to a more complete self-
knowledge.’’ This same journey into the poet’s
inner self may represent the poet’s exploration ofNight watchman(Image copyright Winthrop Brookhouse, 2009.
Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Acquainted with the Night