Acquainted With The Night

The poem “Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost is a poem that symbolically describes physical and emotional isolation during depression. The readers initially think the poem is about loneliness, but there is a deeper meaning. In the beginning, the speaker “walked out and in rain--and back in rain” and “outwalked the furthest city light,” creating an image of sadness and isolation ( Frost 2,3). Because the speaker chooses the gloom of the rain and the darkness of the edge of civilization, it is evident, that for him, “nighttime is a period of feeling total isolation and detachment from social groups, a time of disconnection, lack of communication, and a measure of vulnerability” (Monahan). As the speaker shows the depression and

When the speaker “passed the watchman on his beat / And dropped [his] eyes, unwilling to explain,” it shows he is afraid that no one can understand his situations (Frost 5-6). The speaker has made the conscious choice to walk alone at night, so it is evident that he “has been introduced to trouble, to the limits of human understanding, to the questions that have no easy answers”, so that he might not even want to talk about it with anyone (Monahan). The speaker insists that he has always been “acquainted with the night,” showing the depressions and loneliness he has been unable to escape (Frost 1). The speaker does not seem to care about the “luminary clock” that “proclaimed the time neither wrong nor night” as he wanders far away, not remembering the time is passing ( Frost 12,13). As the poem progresses, the speaker seems to lose his sense of direction, and at the “crossroads” that lay before him, he chooses the one that keeps him living in a hopeless world. Because of the speaker is stuck and has lost his way in the “crossroad,” it is suggested “that in this time and place he confronts the unanswered questions, his own littleness, his detachment from others, perhaps even the dark night of his human soul”