“Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost is a poem addressed to the audience, in the voice of the poet, about the poet himself walking alone through the night alone. The poem is rhyme scheme is iambic pentameter. The poem has a lonely tone and a recurring theme of isolation and not belonging anywhere. Frost takes the reader through 14 lines of imagery, metaphor, symbolism, alliteration, and repetition to convey his loneliness and dreary mood. But it feelings as if his is searching for something within himself and leaves to reader searching as well by the end of the poem. In the first line and the last line of the poem are the same. “I have been one acquainted with the night”. This use of repetition shows us the importance of the line. The title of the poem is alones in lines 1 and 14. It may be the most important lines of the whole poem. Frost is saying he is familiar with the night. Like he knows about the loneliness of night and has been in that place before. The night is a metaphor of darkness and the loneliness he is feeling. …show more content…
“I have outwalked the furthest city light” speaks of passing the edge of civilization. “I have passed the watchman on his beat/ And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” (ll.5-6) In these two lines we get a sense of shame. He drops his he eyes because he doesn’t want to make eye contact. He doesn’t want to make any connection with the watchman, not wanting there to be a witness to his wandering at night. The use of alteration in line 7 allow the reader to hear what he hears and be in that moment. “I have stood still and stopped the sound feet.”
As the man in the poem continues his journey, he takes time to notice things in detail. This I believe is a way of cherishing what you might not see again. This also shows us that he cares about the community to notice the little things one last time. For example Edward Field describes the "magnolia trees with dying flowers" and the "bright spring day" (qtd. in Schwiebert 41). The man even picked up the local newspaper before he left, this shows that he cares what is going on in the town and feels enough apart of the community to find out what is in the newspaper that day.
Poetry frequently contains elements of the natural world, such as light, water, and darkness, because of the near universality of these elements. In Emily Dickinson’s Poem 419 and in Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night”, the dominant images present are of darkness and night. In both poems, darkness and night are metaphors for human problems; however, Poem 419 is optimistic whereas “Acquainted with the Night” is pessimistic.
“Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay uses similar tones, but their contrasting figures of speech and imagery communicate different views of loneliness.
...s darkness which is displayed as his shadows. Slipping into silence is like someone slowly slipping in through a door into a room but then, as if surprised, there is a cry or a yell. As the man trails, or follows, the music gets more and more quiet until it is as faint as a small sigh. At the end of the poem, the quiet noise is like when an accordion is folded into its box and makes a faded noise.
Frost uses a religious allusion to further enforce the objective of the poem. Whether Frost's argument is proven in a religious or scientific forum, it is nonetheless true. In directly citing these natural occurrences from inanimate, organic things such as plants, he also indirectly addresses the phenomena of aging in humans, in both physical and spiritual respects. Literally, this is a poem describing the seasons. Frosts interpretation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer.
The night is a symbol for dark moments of solitude during the speaker’s life. Through being “acquainted with the night” (line 1), the speaker is saying that he is familiar with darkness, proving how symbolism brings out a detached tone with the help of diction, saying that isolated darkness is something the speaker experiences regularly. The exertion of the night as symbolism creates an image for readers to realize that Frost did not actually mean nighttime in his poem; he used the night as symbolism to provide deeper insight and bring the image of our own dark times to describe as “the night”(line 1) just as the speaker of “Acquainted With the Night” did. Symbolism goes on to present itself in line 2, the “rain” is used as a symbol for tears and melancholy. The rain was not meant to be read literally, but rather symbolically as tears, or times of mourning over the harsh struggles in life, just as the speaker did when he “walked out in rain and back in rain” (line 2) meaning he walked into and out of life’s struggles. If the weather is cold and rainy, no one goes outside because of the gloomy clouds and cold rain. Similarly, no one reached out to the speaker in “Acquainted With the Night” during his gloomy periods of “rain”(line 2) or sadness, which expresses
Frost uses different stylistic devices throughout this poem. He is very descriptive using things such as imagery and personification to express his intentions in the poem. Frost uses imagery when he describes the setting of the place. He tells his readers the boy is standing outside by describing the visible mountain ranges and sets the time of day by saying that the sun is setting. Frost gives his readers an image of the boy feeling pain by using contradicting words such as "rueful" and "laugh" and by using powerful words such as "outcry". He also describes the blood coming from the boy's hand as life that is spilling. To show how the boy is dying, Frost gives his readers an image of the boy breathing shallowly by saying that he is puffing his lips out with his breath.
“Its deserted streets are a potent symbol of man and nature 's indifference to the individual. The insistence of the narrator on his own self-identity is in part an act of defiance against a constructed, industrial world that has no place for him in its order” (Bolton). As the poem continues on, the narrator becomes aware of his own consciousness as he comes faces nature and society during his walk. He embraces nature with the rain, dark and moon but he also reinforces his alienation from society as he ignores the watchman and receives no hope of cries for him. The societal ignorance enforces our belief that he is lonely on this gloomy night. “When he passes a night watchman, another walker in the city with whom the speaker might presumably have some bond, he confesses, ‘I… dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.’ Likewise, when he hears a voice in the distance, he stops in his tracks--only to realize that the voice is not meant "to call me back or say goodbye" (Bolton). The two times he had a chance to interact with the community, either he showed no interest in speaking or the cry wasn’t meant for him. These two interactions emphasize his loneliness with the
Diction can define a poem’s attitude, and Frost’s use of night-related diction and depressive diction defines the poem significantly. In lines 11-12, Frost writes, “And further still at an unearthly height, / One luminary clock against the sky”. The word luminary, coming from the latin word lumen (light), means “ a body that gives off light, such as the sun or the moon”. One can safely assume that the moon is being referenced in this case, as the poem takes place in the night. The moon could both symbolize a figurative
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, and he likes having thought of it so well. He says again, good fences make good neighbors” (Frost 584). This illustrates the speaker’s view of his neighbor, comparing his appearance and his rationality to an “old-stone savage” that “moves in darkness”. In addition, this demonstrates the speaker’s frustration and anger with his neighbor, implying that his neighbor’s mentality is stuck in the past, incapable of thinking
In conclusion, Frost has explored different ways in which he incorporates loneliness and isolation in many of his poems. Three of Frost’s most popular poems demonstrates this act as solitude and desolation is represented and symbolized through the dark night in “Acquainted With the Night,” the objects and experiences the speaker bears in “Waiting,” and finally, the theme of abandonment and abdication in “Ghost house.” The aspect of loneliness and isolation helps enhances the main message or possibly the theme of the poems more.
“Acquainted in the Night” is a poem by Robert Frost which was published in 1928. In the poem, Frost talks about how lonely he was when he was walking at night in the streets which had then been isolated. For the whole period that he walked past the city limits covering every available lane, he did not find anything that would help him in comforting the depression that he had. His unwillingness to talk to anyone was evident when he failed to express his feelings to the people he made contact with, majority of them being watchmen. This is because the narrator has the notion that even if he did talk to someone, no one would be able to understand him.
In the third line Frost states, "And the ground is almost covered in snow. " This starts to paint the image of an empty field being covered by more and more snow. Towards the end of the poem, Frost makes reference to the stars. Space between stars is perhaps the biggest empty space we can begin to comprehend. The "Desert Places" are demonstrated through the use of a snowy field and outer space.
In the two poems, Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost and We Grow Accustomed to the Dark by Emily Dickinson, the authors analyze the significance of dark and night differently by using first person point of view, vivid imagery, and different syntax to symbolize hardships and loneliness. As Robert Frost discuss the night with his hardships, Emily Dickinson compares the imagery of darkness to a hardship. In Dickinson’s poem, the imagery of darkness is used to represent her sad situation. The poem starts with a first person perspective by “We grow accustomed to the Dark, When Light is put away...”
Frost mentions sleep six different times during the poem “After Apple-Picking”, but he is not always speaking strictly of sleep. Winter has long been a season symbolically associated with the end of a person’s life. With the line “Essence of winter sleep is on the night” Frost uses the combination of winter and sleep t...