Acquainted With the Night
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Acquainted With the Night is a poem by Robert Frost. It first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and was published in 1928 in his collection West-Running Brook.
Acquainted With the Night also inspired a non-fiction book written by Christopher Dewdney.
[edit] Explanation and interpretations
A popular interpretation of the poem considers it an expression of the ironic loneliness found within a city. The setting, one unusual for the normally bucolic Frost, is one of many human interactions: the watchmen, on his beat; the cry in the night; the light, lane, houses, and clock, which all are man-made creations. Here he walks alone, unwilling to explain, and though he hears the sounds of the humans around him, they do not intend to interact with him, but rather exist only to be observed by the lone-traveling author. Other interpretations consider the city and the night to be metaphors for society and death, respectively.
The poem is written in a terza rima variation of a sonnet, that is, where rhymes follow this complex scheme: aba bcb cdc dad aa (with an ending rhyme in "a" again). The meter is strict iambic pentameter.
