the unknown territory, a poetic experimentation
that characterizes the height of American mod-
ernism of Frost’s time.
With its conventional symbol of the ‘‘night’’
in the title, opening line, and the concluding line,
Frost’s ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ invites its
readers to examine death and grief expressed in
the poem. Yet the ‘‘night’’ should not be taken as
a conventional symbol; rather, the darkness of
the night represents the symbols, form, and
structure of a poem that no other poet has
explored in the past. Whereas the ‘‘city’’ and its
‘‘light’’ in line 3 represent civilized society or
traditional poetry, the darkness of the ‘‘night’’
in this poem represents the kind of poems and its
poetic devices that the speaker’s predecessors
have not yet explored. Thus, ‘‘I have been one
acquainted with the night’’ in the opening and
concluding lines, as well as ‘‘I have outwalked
the furthest city light’’ (3), express that the
speaker-poet has experimented with new techni-
ques. However, the speaker-poet has written
experimental poems only on occasion, for he
claims, ‘‘I have walked out in rain—and back in
rain’’ (2). The speaker implies that he has always
come back to traditional poetry.
Whereas the first stanza of the poem presents
the speaker as an experimental poet, the second
stanza presents a slightly different side of the
speaker. In, the second stanza, consisting of two
complete sentences, the speaker-poet calls the city
lane, or traditional poetry, ‘‘the saddest’’ (4).
While exploring the unknown territory, the
speaker poet has ‘‘passed by the watchman on
his beat’’ (5), but he could not meet the watch-
man’s eyes and says, ‘‘And dropped my eyes,
unwilling to explain’’ (6). This watchman is the
only other human character in the poem, but the
speaker avoids human contact. Keat Murray
explains in his ‘‘Robert Frost’s Portrait of a
Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of
‘Acquainted with the Night’’’:
The word ‘‘watchman’’ relies on the sense of
sight. [... ] And instrumental to the watchman
is his function at his post as the embodiment of
conscience, or its visual sign. [... ] The fact that
the persona drops his eyes from the watchman
indicates a measure of guilt or reticence so dis-
sonant that it resounds with a din from his
conscience all the way to God. (376)
This God-like watchman is also the speaker’s
conscience that tells him to stay in the traditional
paths, or those surrounding the speaker who
remind him of the safe paths. The watchman, on
the other hand, can be a man in charge of a watch,
a timekeeper, so to speak, because time is another
recurring symbol in the poem. In the fourth
stanza, the poet observes ‘‘One luminary clock
against the sky’’ (12), which is both the moon
and a clock tower, and concludes in the final
couplet that ‘‘the time was neither wrong nor
right’’ (13). That the speaker cannot make an
eye contact with the timekeeper of poetic tradi-
tion and is, ‘‘unwilling to explain’’ (6) suggests
that the speaker is not willing to explain his urge
to experiment.
In addition to the symbols of ‘‘Acquainted
with the Night,’’ the form of this poem enhances
Poirier’s suggestion that Frost’s poem is often
about the creative process. Although the speaker
is straying away from poetic tradition, he is not
completely out of its limits. ‘‘Acquainted with
the Night’’ is written in a terza rima sonnet,
using four tercets of an interlocking three-line
rhyme scheme. In a Petrarchan sonnet, the nat-
ural thematic break often comes between the
first eight line, octave, and the concluding six
line, sestet. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the the-
matic break is frequently after three quatrains
and right before the concluding couplet. How-
ever, in ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ the break
comes prematurely at the end of the first two
tercets. The first sestet relies on the speaker’s
motion, such as ‘‘walked’’ (2) ‘‘outwalked’’ (3),
and ‘‘‘passed’’ (5); in the last octave, the speaker
stops and ponders: ‘‘I have stood still’’ (7). The
first two stanzas consist of five complete senten-
ces, whereas the last three stanzas have only two
complete sentences—one expanding from line 7
to line 13, and the other on line 14. Unlike a
Shakespearean sonnet, there is not break right
before the concluding couplet because line 12
serves as the subject of line 13: ‘‘One luminary
clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time wasIN ADDITION TO THE SYMBOLS OF‘ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT,’ THE FORM OF
THIS POEM ENHANCES POIRIER’S SUGGESTION THAT
FROST’S POEM IS OFTEN ABOUT THE CREATIVE
PROCESS.’’
Acquainted with the Night