formless and vague. Second, water accompanies
the darkness, as a prescience of the coming of
life. Third, the God-figure produces light in con-
trast to the vast chaos; thus, the primordial con-
fusion is wrought into a semblance of order. The
two forces conjoin, alternating in a perpetual
and self-fulfilling cycle that is represented in the
symbol of yin-yang. The persona’s venture into
the darkness, water, and light parallels that of
the Creator. But Frost’s narrator does not create
the natural world, rather he sees the natural
world within himself. The parallels between the
creation of the cosmos and the creation of the
persona’s poem culminate in the awakening of
consciousness from the unconscious state, from
darkness into light. Yet as the poem continues,
the persona moves beyond light and seeks reve-
lation in the darkness rather than being repulsed
by its density and ambiguity. Like the character
Ananyev in Anton Chekhov’s ‘‘Lights,’’ he
explores the primordial ‘‘nocturnal gloom [for]
some vital secret’’ (32) that can overcome his
nihilistic tendencies. Frost’s persona fulfills a
similar role as a representative of the archetypal
man amidst what Jung terms the collective
unconscious, which is, in sum, a mind of myth-
ical proportions. As Jung indicates, the uncon-
scious influence does not terminate with the
awakening.
Instead it contributes to the continual shap-
ing of consciousness. This is elemental to Frost’s
poem, for the persona is compelled to compose
art from his experience with the void of dark-
ness. But Frost takes one more step, for the
awakening of consciousness is inextricably
bound to thought, emotion, action, and con-
science. The persona’s experience taps the vital
unconscious which, uninhibited by the vastness
of the archetypes, assimilates them with experi-
ence. This unrestrained surge of the Jungian
mind is explained by Miguel Serrano: ‘‘to project
the light of the consciousness into the bottomless
sea of the Unconscious, which is to say, into God
himself’’ (qtd. by Leeming, 333). By engaging
mythical symbols the persona propels artistic
creation back to its creative model, God. Syn-
thesizing natural elements and human artifice,
the persona is naturally inclined to venture into
the collective unconscious through the embodi-
ments of archetypes. In a sense, the poem sug-
gests two integral parts of the voyage of the
divine, mythical hero: the trial and the descent
into the underworld. At the bottom of the
mythological journey lie the hellish quandaries
of human existence and quest for meaning. The
method befitting our persona’s quest is literary
art hewn from archetypes.
The persona hesitates as he walks into the
rain, as the dash preceding ‘‘and back in rain’’
(Frost, 2) implies. But why is he hesitant and
reticent? Perhaps it is the fear of discerning little
or nothing in the rainy night. But despite this, he
yearns for an approachable order that societal
institutions (the watchman in line five), construc-
tions (city), and conventions cannot offer and have
not fulfilled. He unwittingly turns to universal
archetypes; ironically, the mythological night can
fulfill what in him has been emptied. But what, we
may ask, is left for this man to ponder as he leaves
the furthest city light behind him? It is his own
consciousness within the stream of the collective,
mythical mind. At this point, the archetype of
darkness, water, and light tint the poem with uni-
versal force in the form of the persona’s micro-
cosmic creation. Frost links the consciousness of
the persona with that of God, the being who orig-
inally had only Himself to ponder before creating
His new self-expression. In simpler terms, the per-
sona had been compelled to ponder himself and his
imagination before creating his poetic form. The
present perfect tense of ‘‘I have,’’ then, strongly
implies that the persona continues, even after the
poem, to engage in this process of reflecting upon
himself and his spiritual potential. In short, by
summoning the images of creation myth, the per-
sona sustains a part in a rite, or ‘‘an organization of
mythological symbols.’’Joseph Campbell explains
the drama of the ritual in this way:
by participating in the drama of the rite one is
brought directly in touch with these [symbols],
not as verbal reports of historic events, either
past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here
and now, of what is always and forever... no
one’s sense of the presence of God can be any-
thing more than a function of his spiritual
capacity. (Campbell,Myths,97)
Campbell’s process of the rite recalls T. S. Eliot’s
‘‘objective correlative,’’ which is ‘‘a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of [a] particular emotion’’ (Eliot, 124).
Remaining unnamed, the emotion of Frost’s
poem bridges the gulf between the persona’s con-
ception of God and his spiritual capacity. Both
Campbell’s rite and Eliot’s objective correlative
accentuate spiritual capacity in asserting the need
for the imagined form. Eliot envisions this in the
fusion of art and mind; Campbell in art, mind,
and myth. Frost’s persona applies the thrust ofAcquainted with the Night