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Robert Frost's Acquainted With The Night

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The word “Night” is related to various imaginations and emotions. For example, night can be related to moon and stars, which are only seen at night. In this case, night seems to be mysterious and romantic. However, night can also be related to darkness and horror, so loneliness and fear accompanies one into the night as a result. Robert Frost chooses the night to be the theme of one of his poems “Acquainted With The Night”, and shapes a narrator who is acquainted with the night. The title of the poem seems a little bit strange because of the word “Acquainted”. Anyone can say he or she is acquainted with the night because everyone has the night for half of one’s lifetime. By using the word “Acquainted” , Frost tells readers that the narrator …show more content…

In the first line of the poem, the speaker announces directly “I have been one acquainted with the night” (540). Through using the pronoun “one”, the speaker tries to emphasize his loneliness because he is single at that moment. The pronoun “one” means that the speaker is just one of the people who is acquainted with the night. Also, Frost wants to obtain the rhythm of the poem. The word “night” is the key word in this poem, and most people will associate night with fear and death. However, it is difficult to define what the “night” means to the speaker at the beginning. In this stanza, the narrator walks in the rain and see the city light. The narrator wanders in the night, feeling that he is isolated from the world, despite the fact that he is in the city. The rhyme in the first stanza is obvious because the narrator starts five lines with the same pattern “I have”. Frost uses the first person perspective in order to emphasize the narrator’s loneliness. The word “night” and “light” are end rhymes, which presents a strong rhythm of the poem. Also, the word “light”, which symbolizes bright and warm, contrasts to the dark environment where the speaker …show more content…

Frost uses imagery by witting “I have looked down the saddest city lane”(541). The speaker attaches the emotion sadness to the city lane because he is in a lowest emotion, and everything seems sad as well. The imagery enhances the emotions of the speaker by transferring his sadness to a city lane. The most significant point in this stanza is the watchman, who is the only alive thing in the whole poem. However, the appearance of the watchman in the night catches the narrator’s attention, and the narrator escapes any contact with the watchman, which seems that the speaker is in no mood to convert or connect with another human. We don’t know why the speaker is “unwilling to explain”, but the writer always likes to leave some spaces for the readers to image. The watchman can ensure the safety of people who walk in the night; however, the watchman is unable to comfort the narrator mentally. On the other hand, the narrator accepts the night so that he doesn’t need a watchman appearing in his life to guide

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Everyone has enough knowledge about night and is able to realize the effect that night can give someone, who “knows what is is to be / startled in the night, knows what it is to stumble in the dark, and knows what it is to have restless thoughts / about daytime troubles that prevent sleep,” which could cause some long-term struggles throughout life (Frost 20-22). The reader can infer that depression causes antisocial personalities that could cause a the speaker to run into a ton of problems throughout life. The speaker of “Acquainted with the Night” uses nighttime as the time to think about the past while being alone. One reason people may go out at night is to get away from people due to that fact that there is a completely “total isolation and detachment from social groups, a time of disconnection, / lack of communication, and a measure of vulnerability” which explains the reason that the speaker goes for walks at night (Frost 15-17). The repeated steps that the speaker has made, as he “walked out in rain-- and back in rain,” gives evidence that the speaker is depressed having no idea what to do anymore, because he has physically isolated himself away from everyone (Frost 2).

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