Robert Frost's 'Acquainted With The Night'

A simplistic poem by Robert Frost, “acquainted with the night” already gives the readers a hint about what’s to come. The theme of the poem primarily is isolation but Frost also shows the cold reality of life with his words. The poem shows how life can give a person false hope and the writing itself is a pretty sad piece. A pretty simple poem, Frost has made it pretty unique and special by the use of tools like imagery, symbolization, rhyme, setting and a wonderfully worked theme.
The poem tells us the speaker of the poem keeps going on long around the town at night, walking back and forth from a place as if he was trying to find something, often times just walking in dark and lonely streets. A part of the poem was how the person used to walk past the watchman but he didn’t say a word nor looked up. In line 7 he stops walking and notices the utter silence and the sound of his feet which was comforting to him is now stopped, he does however hear another sound and hopes falsely that it is calling to him. The rain, silence, dark lanes all bring out the theme of isolation and shows us how life is full of pain as well.

We also see how Frost has used “Terza Rima” pattern of ABA CDC DAD AA. The poems structure related to the speaker as the speaker walks with a steady rhythm on the pavement much like the iambic pentameter which creates a similar rhythm for the reader of a beat. Another reason for Terza Rima could be how we know the rhyme scheme moves forward while at the same time echoes of the past bringing in a key element of the poem which is the moon. The wording of the poem is pretty simple with no exceptionally hard words being used throughout