Sonnet Analysis: Acquainted With The Night by Robert Frost

Acquainted With The Night 
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Best%20Sonnets.htm

After searching through lots of modern sonnets trying to find one that was hilariously funny, I decided to settle (if you call it that) with Acquainted With The Night by Robert Frost. Undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century in the United States, I felt like by picking this I would have a lot of stuff to sink my teeth into.

Let's break it down. First thing I probably need to do is classify the type of sonnet. At first glance, it looks a little bit tricky, given that there are no Octaves, Sestets, or even Quatrains (referring to our trusted powerpoint cheat sheet). The only things that give it away to being a Shakespearean Sonnet are the Rhyming Couplet at the end (ah-ha!) and the fact that that the sonnet follows the Shakespearean Rhyme Pattern for the most part. In addition, on closer examination we see that Frost doesn't use the traditional end rhyme scheme, but instead takes a page out of the villanelle playbook by going with terza rima. Therefore, we can regard Frost's poem in a unique way in that he combines the Shakespearean Sonnet and Villanelle Forms in a brilliant poetic display.

One of my favorite things we've talked about so far in this class has been the popular conflict of light vs dark. Once again, it surfaces here in this poem. The narrator is essentially lamenting on how his life has essentially gone down the supposedly wrong path of darkness and away from the good path of light. The important narrative quality I recognized after reading this was that the passive voice indicates that the narrator doesn't really have any control over his fate now, if he did at all to begin with.

I feel like much of this decisiveness regarding the narrator's fate comes from the turn, which I deduced to be the last line of the third tercet and the first line of the fourth tercet. The spaced line in between serves as an effective pause mechanism for the readers, almost as if we are hanging on every last word. When we see that the cry "Came over houses from another street", we essentially think that this might be the turning point for the narrator, perhaps his chance to become a hero and get back in the light. However, these hopes are absolutely SHATTERED in the next line "But not to call me back, or say good-by;". We really feel for the narrator, looking at him essentially as a figure upon whom life has passed by.

This leads me to the big meaning/theme point. Essentially, Robert's Sonnet effectively uses the confines of the Shakespearean Sonnet in order to emphasize through the narrator that past actions have the power to permanently shape one's fate for the rest of one's life.