Today’s Poem: Acquainted With the Night

Robert Frost’s Dantean Darkness

Soter Jaxa-Malachowski, Nocturne, 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Acquainted With the Night

by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have out walked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say goodbye;
And further still, at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
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First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1928, Today’s Poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963) takes up the dark undercurrent hinted at in his famous 1923 poem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In that earlier poem, the speaker who gazes on the dark beauty of the winter woods perceives beauty’s deadly undertow: the temptation simply to stop, forever, in a single moment.

But he also feels the counterweight of his own less romantically alluring “promises to keep,” which recall him to life, with its envisioned future of moments and miles to go. And as a man in a position to choose his way, presumably he does so. We assume, anyway, that the road goes on past the end of the poem, and that the speaker takes it.

The first-person speaker in “Acquainted With the Night” resembles that earlier poem’s speaker, although from a vantage point some miles down that road. Or perhaps after all he hasn’t gone down the road, but has surrendered to the allure and stayed to make friends with the dark. By the time we catch up with him, he has seen the night, up close and chillingly impersonal, without the hypnotic beauty of those snowy woods or the possibility, through his own agency, of escape from them.

He observes, now, a grittier urban darkness, where the clean cover of snow has been dissolved in rain. Each successive stanza moves him, and by extension the reader, closer to the heart of a terrible night in the heart of a terrible city from which there seems to be no ultimate escape.

From the outskirts, where he has “outwalked the furthest city light” and turned “back in rain,” the poem’s speaker penetrates deeper and deeper into the dark lanes, bearing a hinted-at shame. Passing the night watchman, he averts his gaze. Possessed of language, able to speak, yet “unwilling” to do so, he seems tacitly to acknowledge some complicity in the perpetuation of this midnight world.

In the dystopian night, even the scantest encounter with an embodied human presence quickly passes. When the speaker stops, all footsteps cease, signaling simultaneously his own aloneness and the creepy sensation of being followed by a stalker who stops when he does.

Robert Frost (Wikimedia Commons)

In the next line, a cry — seemingly self-generated — sounds over the inanimate roofs of houses that otherwise might as well be uninhabited. This cry communicates nothing, neither “to call me back” nor to “say goodbye.” It’s an inarticulate sound, possibly inhuman, almost immediately stifled: “an interrupted cry.” At last he arrives at the stopped clock, illuminating the reality that here time itself, like language, has lost all meaning.

Everything in this nightscape appears wordless, amorphous. Only the I, the poet-speaker, alienated from it all in his lonely possession of language, is left to tell — or to create this poetic universe out of the darkness in himself.

The poem’s form — a sonnet in terza rima, resolving its repetitive pattern in a final couplet — amplifies the muted horror of the scene. This is Dante’s form, the form of the Divine Comedy, the very scheme by which his own poetic counterpart descends into hell and returns to tell his journey. Dante, of course, continues upward through Purgatory and into Paradise, but Frost’s speaker seems doomed only to walk back and forth in the rain of a flattened material world with no transcendent vista.

The regularity of the iambic pentameter here shifts the emphasis, in every line beginning with I have, onto the present perfect tense of the verb in that first foot. I have been and done these things; I might continue to be and do these things perpetually.

While it’s possible to read those initial feet as trochees, reading them as iambs in keeping with the poem’s predominant meter heightens our sense of the speaker’s predicament. The actions he expresses are ongoing. He continues, suspended in this state of existence, though again, apparently unlike the other denizens of this perpetual night, he still possesses language with which to reflect and report on his predicament.

By the time Frost’s speaker proclaims, again, that he has “been one acquainted with the night,” we understand that night as the black eternity of hell and himself as a soul trapped in it. We also understand that, at least within the bounds of this poem, he makes no escape and hopes for nothing more.

Although he outwalks the city lights, he turns back again, as if compelled, into the streets — has done, and will do again, in an action never put away in the simple past. Still, this poet-speaker in his continual rounds has gained more insight, grim though it is, about the nature of darkness, than on that former night when he stood looking, with longing, at the trees in the snow.

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