19 pages • 38 minutes read
Acquainted with the Night
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Themes
The Experience of Loneliness
The dominance of the first-person singular pronoun defines the poem’s thematic examination of the experience of loneliness. Whatever the speaker’s emotional strength (or weakness), the speaker moves about the city streets very much alone. The presence of the passing cop and even the muffled cry from some nearby street cannot lessen the feeling of alienation. In fact, the speaker declines even to make eye contact with the “watchman” (Line 5) and quickly assures himself that the “interrupted cry” (Line 8) is not directed to him.
The only other sound is the easy rhythm of the speaker’s own footsteps. But even from that, the speaker feels disconnected: “I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet” (Line 7), which is a convoluted way of saying he stopped walking, as if his own feet were not his to control. Because the poem recounts a walk to the outskirts of the city, “[the speaker has] outwalked the furthest city light” (Line 3) to arrive at a place where the busyness of the city with its network of streets and sidewalks, buildings and lights, gives way to the cloaking dark of the country. This sense of distance, disconnection, and apartness further enhances the speaker’s loneliness. The poem does not offer any context for the speaker’s recollection of this lonely walk. No cause is offered that might explain the poet’s actions or why he has been moved to remember it. That emotional distance from the reader gives the poem’s loneliness its existential dimension.
The speaker, however, does not feel kinship with the enveloping night. Even the night itself, the most immediate presence in the speaker’s experience, is no friend. Rather, it is an acquaintance, a term used for passing familiarity. For the speaker, there is no comfort save the consolation of his own footsteps, his awareness of his surroundings, and his own heroic acknowledgment of his continuity, his own presence.
The Existential Threat of the City
Although regarded as one of the defining poets of the 20th century, Frost was actually born just 10 years after the end of the Civil War. His own coming of age was set against America’s rapid maturation into an urban culture. Known mostly for his poems in which he interacts with the rugged and undeveloped rural outback of his adopted New England far from the kinetic hustle of America’s emerging urban sprawl, Frost here argues that within that new urban sprawl the individual can easily get as lost and feel as vulnerable and threatened as they can in the open woods of New England. For Frost, the city, like that forbidding natural world, is supremely indifferent to the anxieties and sorrows, triumphs and joys of those who must live within and around its vastness.
Thus, the city is sad, dreary, disconcertingly quiet, and dark, the sole illumination a gaudy clock tower that only reminds the speaker of the relentless passing of time and, by extension, the relentless approach of mortality. In this, the city, captured only in the slenderest detail, becomes less a geographical site and more an emotional complex, the embodiment of those energies that threatened the integrity of a person, their peace of mind, their very identity. Like his New England outback, the city, for all its streetlights, its lanes, its homes, and its teeming populace, is a perfect place for getting lost in. For Frost’s generation, the city posed a different and more ominous threat to individuals than nature ever did. The city, after all, is humanity’s construct, built for humanity's purposes, sustained by interests, and driven by energy. It is a kind of cultural suicide. Given that Frost’s generation was the first to adjust to the rise of the city and the loss of rural culture, the poem is a threshold statement that reflects the uneasy feeling of a generation, that one forbidding and indifferent landscape (nature) had given way another forbidding and indifferent landscape (the city).
The Remarkable Resilience of the Human Spirit
The speaker is walking. That assertion of presence and that determination to engage firsthand and up close the very darkness that seems so threatening and so cloaking gives the poem its heroic energy. The poem’s use of the present perfect tense (“I have” [Lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 14]) suggests such resilience—the tense is used for actions in the past that continue in the present: I have been there; I will go back there; I will not surrender. Thus, the speaker’s solitary position is no cause for depression or distress. It is not that the speaker misses companionship or even expects it. He even averts his eyes for any contact with the only person he meets during his walk. And it is not as if the speaker is struggling to handle some catastrophic emotional trauma that tests the integrity of his spirit. For the speaker, despair is nothing more than a long walk on a rainy night. The night, the rain—neither lasts all that long.
The poem celebrates human continuity in the face of tragedies and sorrows and the very 20th-century suspicion that life itself is an uncertain and vaguely purposeless struggle against rather than for meaning. The poem’s affirmation rests on a dash: “I have walked out in rain—and back in rain” (Line 2). For just the briefest moment that a dash can last, there is the gripping anxiety that the night, the rain will triumph. This is the poem of a man halfway through the journey of his life, walking about gloomy paths (Frost alludes to the familiar opening lines of Dante’s Inferno and even uses Dante’s intricate poetic form), but unwilling to surrender, particularly in the decidedly secular world of the 20th century, to the too-easy spiral of despair.
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By Robert Frost
