An Analysis Of Robert Frost's Acquainted With The Night

Depression and the feeling of being alone are closely related in the sense that they usually are hand-in-hand. The concept of depression can derive from many forms, ultimately culminating in an ideology that feels isolated. Robert Frost once said “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words”. In Acquainted with the Night, Frost delves deeply into the psyche of someone forsaken by the feeling of depression; himself. This work of literature is written as a sonnet in closed form and formulated with terza rima, a poem formed with tercets, or 3 line stanzas, ABA, BCB, CDC, and DD for this composition. The reasoning behind using the unusual format of terza rima in this piece is because Frost wants

Through the use of imagery and symbolism, Robert Frost explores the eerie, unsettling essence of being out at night, and uses darkness and loneliness to describe the nature of depression. Robert Frost was a modern poet in his works of irony and dubiousness that often explained the complexity and darkness of many universal themes. Frost grew up in San Francisco during the late 1870s with his sister Jeanie and his mother and father, until his father, William Prescott Frost Jr, died from tuberculosis, which caused Frost’s mother, Isabelle Moodie, to take her children and move to Lawarence, Massachusetts (“Acquainted with the Night: Poetry for Students”). During his high school years, and even well into his college years, Frost developed an interest in poetry. In 1894, after leaving Dartmouth College, departing before the end of the term, he attended Harvard University in Boston and proceeded to publish his first major work of poetry “My Butterfly: An Elegy”, which gained him some notoriety. Frost mostly gained inspiration for writing poetry from Elinor Miriam White, whom he would eventually marry in 1895 (“Robert Frost”). The two would have six children, but sadly four out of the six would die while Frost was still young, succumbing to cholera, birth complications,

As Frost writes, “I have been acquainted with the night. / I have walked out in rain – and back in rain. / I have outwalked the furthest city light” (1-3). He establishes that he has delved deeply into depression multiple times and the tumultuous behaviors that affect his surroundings. Frost uses the setting of night early on in his poem as a symbol for abjection and the feeling of loneliness one could endure rather than solely as a setting. As a reader finishes the first line of the poem, it becomes more apparent that this is not the first time the speaker has walked among the streets at this hour. The word light, meaning the medium of illumination that makes sight possible (“light”), can be attributed to a way out of depression. By observing the word “light” in this poem as an image of hope, or simply the right path that should be taken, the speaker’s depressive outlook on life becomes a reality, as he simply has “outwalked the furthest city light”(3). Frost’s bleakly visualized idea of hope in the diminishing embodiment of depression radiates throughout his