“Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost is a poem addressed to the audience, in the voice of the poet, about the poet himself walking alone through the night alone. The poem is rhyme scheme is iambic pentameter. The poem has a lonely tone and a recurring theme of isolation and not belonging anywhere. Frost takes the reader through 14 lines of imagery, metaphor, symbolism, alliteration, and repetition to convey his loneliness and dreary mood. But it feelings as if his is searching for something within himself and leaves to reader searching as well by the end of the poem. In the first line and the last line of the poem are the same. “I have been one acquainted with the night”. This use of repetition shows us the importance of the line. The title of the poem is alones in lines 1 and 14. It may be the most important lines of the whole poem. Frost is saying he is familiar with the night. Like he knows about the loneliness of night and has been in that place before. The night is a metaphor of darkness and the loneliness he is feeling. …show more content…
“I have outwalked the furthest city light” speaks of passing the edge of civilization. “I have passed the watchman on his beat/ And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” (ll.5-6) In these two lines we get a sense of shame. He drops his he eyes because he doesn’t want to make eye contact. He doesn’t want to make any connection with the watchman, not wanting there to be a witness to his wandering at night. The use of alteration in line 7 allow the reader to hear what he hears and be in that moment. “I have stood still and stopped the sound feet.”
In “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” and “Acquainted with the Night” the darkness or night is the most prominent topic throughout the poems but have different meanings. While both poets address this topic in their poems, Dickinson transitions from an attitude of nerves to one of inspiration, while Frost turns to the night as a getaway from harsh society. The night is used in both as negative symbol. The use of imagery and structure are very important to help get the message of darkness across to the readers. Even though the authors have a similar theme, Frost is specific and to the point, while Dickinson’s makes her poetry more broad and can relate to a variety of readers.
As the man in the poem continues his journey, he takes time to notice things in detail. This I believe is a way of cherishing what you might not see again. This also shows us that he cares about the community to notice the little things one last time. For example Edward Field describes the "magnolia trees with dying flowers" and the "bright spring day" (qtd. in Schwiebert 41). The man even picked up the local newspaper before he left, this shows that he cares what is going on in the town and feels enough apart of the community to find out what is in the newspaper that day.
Poetry frequently contains elements of the natural world, such as light, water, and darkness, because of the near universality of these elements. In Emily Dickinson’s Poem 419 and in Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night”, the dominant images present are of darkness and night. In both poems, darkness and night are metaphors for human problems; however, Poem 419 is optimistic whereas “Acquainted with the Night” is pessimistic.
“Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay uses similar tones, but their contrasting figures of speech and imagery communicate different views of loneliness.
Frost uses different stylistic devices throughout this poem. He is very descriptive using things such as imagery and personification to express his intentions in the poem. Frost uses imagery when he describes the setting of the place. He tells his readers the boy is standing outside by describing the visible mountain ranges and sets the time of day by saying that the sun is setting. Frost gives his readers an image of the boy feeling pain by using contradicting words such as "rueful" and "laugh" and by using powerful words such as "outcry". He also describes the blood coming from the boy's hand as life that is spilling. To show how the boy is dying, Frost gives his readers an image of the boy breathing shallowly by saying that he is puffing his lips out with his breath.
...s darkness which is displayed as his shadows. Slipping into silence is like someone slowly slipping in through a door into a room but then, as if surprised, there is a cry or a yell. As the man trails, or follows, the music gets more and more quiet until it is as faint as a small sigh. At the end of the poem, the quiet noise is like when an accordion is folded into its box and makes a faded noise.
Frost uses a religious allusion to further enforce the objective of the poem. Whether Frost's argument is proven in a religious or scientific forum, it is nonetheless true. In directly citing these natural occurrences from inanimate, organic things such as plants, he also indirectly addresses the phenomena of aging in humans, in both physical and spiritual respects. Literally, this is a poem describing the seasons. Frosts interpretation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, and he likes having thought of it so well. He says again, good fences make good neighbors” (Frost 584). This illustrates the speaker’s view of his neighbor, comparing his appearance and his rationality to an “old-stone savage” that “moves in darkness”. In addition, this demonstrates the speaker’s frustration and anger with his neighbor, implying that his neighbor’s mentality is stuck in the past, incapable of thinking
This is the obvious observation, but the poem seems to be referring to much more. In line eight of the poem Frost writes, "The Loneliness includes me unawares." Albert J. Von Fronk makes an interesting observation in saying, "The poet notes that he, too, is "absent-spirited"; he, too, is "included" in the loneliness. " It is not just the animals and snowy field the speaker is accusing of being lonely, but themselves as well. The field seems to be a metaphor for the speaker's loneliness.
In the poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, the Romantic poet explores the idea of humanity through nature. This sonnet holds a conversational tone with a depressing mood as the man walks in the dark city trying to gain knowledge about his “inner self”. The narrator takes a stroll at night to embrace the natural world but ignores the society around him. His walk allows him to explore his relationship with nature and civilization. In “Acquainted with the Night”, the narrator emphasizes his isolation from the society by stating his connectivity with the natural world.
To begin with, the understanding of loneliness and desolation is identified through the use of the dark night in one of Frost’s most popular poems, “Acquainted With the Night.” Briefly, this poem revolves around a lonely speaker who is endlessly taking a walk beyond the city he or she lives in but is not able to locate anything or anyone that would comfort the speaker in his or her stage of depression. Loneliness and isolation are actually two of the crucial themes associated with this poem. The speaker is being “acquainted with the night,” because the night shares the same emotion that the speaker carries. They carry the same emotion because from personal references, the nighttime is often referred to as the time of reflection, sadness, loneliness, and indeed isolation. There is and evident choice of diction to depict isolation like, “the furthest city light,” (L3) as the speaker grows farther away from the city and loses light, which contributes more to the idea of the dark night. This also heightens the understanding of the speaker’s depression and isolation. “The s...
In the two poems, Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost and We Grow Accustomed to the Dark by Emily Dickinson, the authors analyze the significance of dark and night differently by using first person point of view, vivid imagery, and different syntax to symbolize hardships and loneliness. As Robert Frost discuss the night with his hardships, Emily Dickinson compares the imagery of darkness to a hardship. In Dickinson’s poem, the imagery of darkness is used to represent her sad situation. The poem starts with a first person perspective by “We grow accustomed to the Dark, When Light is put away...”
In literary works, night often is depicted in a negative manner, symbolizing loneliness, depression, fear, or death. However, night is not always negative. When night can bring monsters from fantasy dreams, it can also bring the moon and stars. The night is a time for being alone. Similarly, Robert Frost uses depressive diction, a lack of human interaction, and the use of the present perfect tense in “Acquainted with the Night” to contribute to the sense of regret and isolation the poem gives.
“Acquainted in the Night” is a poem by Robert Frost which was published in 1928. In the poem, Frost talks about how lonely he was when he was walking at night in the streets which had then been isolated. For the whole period that he walked past the city limits covering every available lane, he did not find anything that would help him in comforting the depression that he had. His unwillingness to talk to anyone was evident when he failed to express his feelings to the people he made contact with, majority of them being watchmen. This is because the narrator has the notion that even if he did talk to someone, no one would be able to understand him.
Frost mentions sleep six different times during the poem “After Apple-Picking”, but he is not always speaking strictly of sleep. Winter has long been a season symbolically associated with the end of a person’s life. With the line “Essence of winter sleep is on the night” Frost uses the combination of winter and sleep t...