Acquainted With The Night And T. S. Eliot's Acquainted With The Night

645 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Importance of thought structure in poems

Rhythm Rhyme and Structure

Poetry is the expression of feelings and ideas through different styles of writing; this can be presented in many different fashions. An artist of poetry uses distinct structural patterns such as rhymes, meter, symbolism or tone to convey their message to the reader. For this essay I will demonstrate how the use of these patterns help and or hinder the reader’s experience in understanding the meaning; I will be reviewing and analyzing two specific pieces of work; Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night and T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Frost’s poem Acquainted with the Night expresses sadness and unhappiness. The poem reflects an empty feeling of loneliness and being surrounded by darkness. The rhyme in stanza one, ending with night and light, is important to the tone because it helps the reader understand the feeling frost is trying to convey. The contrast between light and dark has often been used to describe feelings of sadness or loneliness. In this use, it conveys the absence of light, furthering the idea of loneliness. The use of the word “I” repeatedly emphasizes the fact that he is alone. This sets the tone of the poem and the structure reflects on this tone.
Frost wrote Acquainted with the Night in iambic pentameter, which is shown by the characteristic that each line contains exactly 10 syllables. This is important because the steady pattern gives a sense of rhythm to the poem and can be related

to the footsteps of the narrator as he walks through the night. The pattern of using end-stop lines in this poem also help with the steady rhythm that Frost was trying for. This structural aspect helps the reader acquire the feeling of the world that Frost wanted to portray...

... middle of paper ...

...ut how Prufrock thinks the mermaids will not sing to him. This brings the reader a sense that Prufrock has extremely low self-esteem without actually having to say it in the poem. Although this is a great way to get the reader to be more interactive with the piece, by using this method, a negative effect for the reader could occur. If the reader does not understand the references and inferences being made about the narrator, than the message that T.S. Eliot is trying to make would become completely lost.
The rhyme scheme and meter of this poem is irregular but not random. Parts of the poem may resemble free verse while other parts have bits and pieces of rhymes. the enjambment of every line couples with the end-rhymes of "pane" and "drain," "leap" and "asleep" to swell the stanza forward. Numerous other examples of the poem's "butt-ends" emerge throughout the poem.

Show More
Related

  • Acquainted With The Night Comparison Essay

    805 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frost's use of imagery and parallelism of what the dark night sky looks like indicates that he is often alone and wanders the empty, cold streets late at night. This also makes it seem as though he was the only one out at night this late and that he feels depressed about his devastating situation. His uses of, "I have been..." repeatedly in lines 1-7 suggests that his depression is ongoing from the past, unclear if he would recover from his depressing past. The reader can feel through his words that even though he can hear sounds of people ("an interrupted cry") on the streets and occasionally bumps into people, he feels alone in this world. Through his actions, Frost makes it seem as though no one in the world cares for him and he is completely isolated and restricted from interacting with people. At one point in the poem, he hears a cry from a nearby street, but realizes that it was not meant for him and that no one is ever waiting for him. He uses the phrase, "I have passed by the watchman on his beat/And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain, " to show his experiences with depression and how it has made him incapable of interacting in normal society. While normal people are typically associated with the day, enjoying happiness, sunlight, and optimism, he focuses the narrator to being solely with the night, finding

    Read More

  • Use Of Diction In Acquainted With The Night

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    Frost’s application of diction in “Acquainted With the Night” expresses the meaning that hard times provides isolation through key words that provide the audience with proof that the speaker is communicating a detached mood. In line 1, “acquainted,” is a vital use of diction to show the meaning. The word acquainted means to know very well. When the speaker is saying he is “acquainted with the night” in line 1, he is indicating that he is familiar with the lonely night. By being “acquainted” with darkness, or the night, in his life, the speaker is illustrating how being in an isolated state of life is not new to him. The meaning of detached feelings because of hardships is revealed

    Read More

  • Analysis of Out, Out by Robert Frost

    918 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frost begins the poem by describing a young boy cutting some wood using a "buzz-saw." The setting is Vermont and the time is late afternoon. The sun is setting and the boy's sister calls he and the other workers to come for "Supper." As the boy hears its dinnertime, he gets excited and cuts his hand on accident. Immediately realizing that the doctor might amputate his hand, he asks his sister to make sure that it does not happen. By the time the doctor arrives, it is too late and the boy's hand is already lost. When the doctor gives him anaesthetic, he falls asleep and never wakes up again. The last sentence of the poem, "since they (the boys family and the doctor) were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" shows how although the boys death is tragic, people move on with their life in a way conveying the idea that people only care for themselves.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Frost's Poem, Mending Wall

    1010 Words  | 3 Pages

    Frost's use of detailed description in this poem is quite interesting. It helps provide the reader with a better visual image of the poem. He doesn’t go too far though as to tell the reader exactly what’s going on, he leaves the poem open to interpretation so that the reader can decide for himself what is truly going on between the neighbors. On one hand, Frost tells us specifically what is going on in the poem, the two neighbors meet together at the beg...

    Read More

  • Analysis of Emily Dickinson´s We Grow Accustomed to the Dark and Robert Frost´s Acquainted with the Night

    876 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...med the time was neither wrong nor right. / I have been one acquainted with the night.”(Frost 13-14) to talk about that at some point we must all experience the night he has described in the poem.

    Read More

  • William Wordsworth And Wordsworth's Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

    1848 Words  | 4 Pages

    During the 18th century, two great companion; William Wordsworth collaborated together to create Lyrical Ballad; one of the greatest works of the Romantic period.  The two major poems of Lyrical Ballad are Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Even though these two poems contain different experiences of the two speakers, upon close reading of these poems, the similarities are found in their use of language, the tone, the use of illustrative imagery to fascinate the reader’s visual sense and the message to their loved ones.

    Read More

  • Robert Frost's Poem For Once, Then, Something

    1474 Words  | 3 Pages

    The poem’s diction is fairly simple so that educated and uneducated people alike would be able to read and understand the poem somewhat easily. Because Frost prided himself upon being accessible and relatable to all people,

    Read More

  • Robert Frost's Home Burial

    1316 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his narrative poem, Frost starts a tense conversation between the man and the wife whose first child had died recently. Not only is there dissonance between the couple,but also a major communication conflict between the husband and the wife. As the poem opens, the wife is standing at the top of a staircase looking at her child’s grave through the window. Her husband is at the bottom of the stairs (“He saw her from the bottom of the stairs” l.1), and he does not understand what she is looking at or why she has suddenly become so distressed. The wife resents her husband’s obliviousness and attempts to leave the house. The husband begs her to stay and talk to him about what she feels. Husband does not understand why the wife is angry with him for manifesting his grief in a different way. Inconsolable, the wife lashes out at him, convinced of his indifference toward their dead child. The husband accepts her anger, but the separation between them remains. The wife leaves the house as husband angrily threatens to drag her back by force.

    Read More

  • Loneliness and Isolation in Robert Frost's Poem

    1013 Words  | 3 Pages

    - Frost, Robert. “Acquainted With the Night.” Robert Frost: Selected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 58-59

    Read More

  • My Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock Comparison Essay

    1669 Words  | 4 Pages

    Both Browning and Eliot seek to improve upon the nature of the dramatic monologue. Browning emphasizes structure and a separation between the poet and the character which is reiterated by Eliot’s poem. Browning’s influence on Eliot can be seen by the form and structure of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” adding working intrinsically with the theme and subject of the work. However, Eliot deviates slightly from Browning by the portrayal of his characters, and the amount of information that he is willing to share with the reader. The intended message of Browning’s poem is much more apparent than Eliot’s who creates an open ended poem that can be interpreted differently by each reader.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Love Song Of Prufrock

    1044 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis Of Robert Frost

    2023 Words  | 5 Pages

    This poem is darker than most of Frost’s poems. One of the most depressing lines that are in this poem is, “Now if it was dusk outside Inside it was dark,” (Frost, Lines 3 to 4). From this line, the reader could take that even though there is some happiness outside, all Frost feels on the inside is sadness. It comes up in the poem that it is easier to feel sad than to be happy. In the middle stanza of the poem is when Frost’s positivity starts to reveal itself. He states, “The last of the light of the sun That had died in the west Still lived for one song more In a thrush’s breast.” (Frost, lines 9 to 12). From this statement, it can be gathered from the light that had died still living on. Even though it can’t be seen, Frost still knows that it is there. This is a main focus point of the poem. Having been sad for so long, it is a nice feeling to be happy. Frost is holding on to the feeling of it because he so desperately wants to be happy. This stanza gives a glimpse of hope to the readers, and that is the focus point of Come In, the poem written by Robert

    Read More

  • Psychoanalytic Criticism In The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

    881 Words  | 2 Pages

    T.S. Eliot is often considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th Century. Not only were his highly regarded poems such as “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” influential to the literary style of his time, but his work as a publisher highlighted the work of many talented poets. Analyzing his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with psychoanalytic criticism reveals several core issues in the speaker of the poem, and may reflect Eliot himself.

    Read More

  • Nature in Robert Frost's Poems

    1636 Words  | 4 Pages

    strengthens his viewpoint and regards Frost as ―one of the most intuitive poets [. . . h]e sees

    Read More

  • T.S. Eliots use of Poetic techniques in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland

    1309 Words  | 3 Pages

    T.S Eliot, widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern poetry, has written many great poems. Among the most well known of these are “The Waste Land, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which share similar messages, but are also quite different. In both poems, Eliot uses various poetic techniques to convey themes of repression, alienation, and a general breakdown in western society. Some of the best techniques to examine are ones such as theme, structure, imagery and language, which all figure prominently in his poetry. These techniques in particular are used by Eliot to both enhance and support the purpose of his poems.

    Read More

More about Acquainted With The Night And T. S. Eliot's Acquainted With The Night

Open Document