Summary Of Night By Billy Collins

This poem dramatizes the idea of the night as isolation. The speaker of the poem has “outwalked the furthest city light” but still cannot find anyone who cares about him enough to end his solitude. He speaks of what night was in the city, even when he encounters a watchman and a cry from another street he cannot pull himself out of his loneliness. The narrator, when describing the moon as a luminescent clock, he explains that time has no meaning to him in his isolation. He ends by repeating the first line of the poem. Through all this, the poet seems to ultimately suggest that night in the city is not a period of darkness; it is a smothering blanket separating us from one another. The speaker establishes the central thought of the poem in the first line, in the titular phrase indicating he is familiar with the night. His use of the word ‘acquainted’ here indicated it is a temporary but known aloneness. In the next lines, he establishes how far he’s traveled to shake off this isolation, but to no avail. The repetition of the line “I have walked out in rain—and back in rain”, where the rain is the only bookend to his journey, is probably intentionally vague so as to indicate an indeterminate amount of time. This

Through presumably bursting with people, we only have evidence of two in this city at night. This is probably why he refers to the streets as sad, because once they were full of bustling individuals; they now rest empty and quiet. In this poem and especially this section, the meter and rhyme all perfectly fit, yet the syncopation leans towards a plodding rhythm, furthering the melancholy of the poet’s isolation. The narrator then encounters the first mention of another person in the poem, a watchman on patrol. One might think this would end the speaker’s loneliness, but no, he averts his gaze, and doesn’t seem interested in explaining