19 pages • 38 minutes read
Acquainted with the Night
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“West-Running Brook” by Robert Frost (1928)
The centerpiece poem of the collection in which “Acquainted with the Night” appeared, the poem establishes Frost’s fascination with contrarieties. The river in New Hampshire is the only river in the state that does flow eastward, toward the ocean. The “white wave” (Line 25) that runs counter to itself suggests the contradictory position of the speaker here, at once emotionally vulnerable and happily ironic.
“How the Old Mountains” by Emily Dickinson (1862)
A poet whose works were just beginning to circulate in the 1920s, Dickinson matches Frost’s temperament here. The speaker is enthralled by the stunning drama of the sunset and the slow approach of night. Quite alone, she is as conflicted as Frost’s speaker is, between the exhilarating feeling over such beauty and the reality of time passing and how the sunset suggests the agony of impermanence.
“Tulips” by Sylvia Plath (1961)
Because Frost’s poem is so often read as a study in depression, its ironic and spirited parody of such heavy-handed emotions can best be appreciated by comparing it to this poem, written just months before Plath, 30, died by suicide. The image of the flowers in the speaker’s hospital room suggests the limited power of love to ease her troubled spirit. Indeed, the patient/poet wants the flowers removed because they shatter the cold, sterile white of the hospital room.
Further Literary Resources
“A Critical Glance at ‘Acquainted with the Night’” by Ines Arroyo (1978)
This article is a landmark line-by-line reading that presents the poem as an anatomy of sadness, despair, and loneliness. The reading focuses on the luminary clock and works through it as a symbol of a clock tower, a star, or the moon, whichever way ending up with the dense sorrow over time. The poem explores Frost’s careful manipulation of meter to create a feeling of uncertainty to match the terror in the heart of the speaker.
“Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night’” by Kyoko Amano (2010)
A contemporary reading of the poem, this analysis draws on other Frost poems from the same era and looks at how Frost, himself in midlife, treats ambivalently the idea of death and mortality. The reading finds particularly rich how Frost uses the night, both rural and urban, to suggest the challenge of death, anxiety over its reality, and grief over its power. The reading uses the concept of the journey to show how Frost grounds his vision here in the myths of Antiquity and their tales of journeys into the Underworld.
“Robert Frost’s Portrait of a Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of ‘Acquainted with the Night’” by Murray Keat (2000)
A sweeping investigation into the implications of Frost’s strategy of putting the reader in direct confrontation with the speaker, the article suggests that the poem, despite its brevity and its apparent simplicity, raises questions central to Frost’s generation struggling to come to terms with World War I, how awareness does not offer solutions, depression does not reveal causes, and desire is best expressed as the will to survive.
Listen to Poem
Sadly, the poem has not been recorded with the accent of a northern New Englander, appropriate to Frost’s manipulation of soft long vowels and sibilant s’s. British actor Tom O’Bedlam, who offers a rich archive of recitations of many landmark poems, offers perhaps the quietest, subtlest reading of the poem and does not, as so many other readings, insist on cluttering the poem with images of rainy nights. O’Bedlam’s voice captures a sense of Frost’s cadences and lingers over the closing couplet with a pitch-perfect mix of regret and relief. He delivers the last line as if it is a line of music, discovering tempo in what is otherwise the beat of iambic pentameter.
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By Robert Frost
