Acquainted with the Night

There has always been something grand, even noble, in suffering. From the tragic heroes of Antiquity to the Suffering Servant of Judeo-Christian wisdom literature to the doomed figures of Romantic narratives, sorrow has long been imbued with a sobering gravitas. From Oedipus to Christ, from Hamlet to Ahab, from Dimmesdale to Gatsby, from Anakin Skywalker to Elphaba, suffering elevates. By contrast, happiness and contentment in literary characters seem suspect even when it is earned after great trials. No one stays happy for long in literature; after all, a first-semester MFA student understands that conflict creates plot. Literature endows our day-to-day trials, our pointless busyness, our routine heartaches, our casual disappointments, even our deepest sorrows with value that the experience itself lacks. If faux-contentment and sorrowful awareness seem our only alternatives, Frost, offers a third option: irony, that is, sorrow blessed rather than cursed with awareness.

The analysis of “Acquainted with the Night” begins with that premise. The speaker, apparently plagued by insomnia, restless and unable to find his way to the sweet escape of sleep, moves about the empty streets of a rain-soaked city. He belongs in a warm bed, perhaps with a significant other, far from the street. But the speaker cannot, does not want to resist the fetch and call of the night, and the chance to experience the depth and layers of his expressive nature. Not only is he alone but the speaker feels alone, feels it deep in his heart, in his soul. The present perfect verb tense suggests that sorrow is nothing new to the speaker. It is his past and his ongoing future: “I have been one acquainted with the night” (Line 1). Home cannot assuage him. Sleep eludes him. The forbidding darkness, the risks of nightwalking, and even the intemperate weather cannot provide him a rationale for not walking out into the unsettling dark. The speaker cannot "not" walk.

The poem continually offers rhetoric revealing how effortlessly the speaker fuses his internal mindset onto the city, such as with the line, “I have looked down the saddest city lane” (Line 4). A street, after all, is not capable of emotion. A street cannot be sad unless the person whose perception controls the perspective is sad. It is only when, in the second stanza, the speaker mentions how carefully he skirts meeting the strolling “watchman” (Line 5) that the reader suspects the melancholic tone and the gloomy feel of the speaker’s night walk is perhaps a misreading. If the speaker is in fact so down in the doldrums emotionally that he is driven to wander the empty streets of a sleeping city, why not seek out the only other living person who circulates the streets, why not a greeting and the possibility of light chitchat, a moment able to dispel the oppressive sadness if even for a slender moment. Rather, the speaker “drops [his] eyes” (Line 6) and keeps moving on. He is protective of his alienation, eager to preserve its integrity. There is something keen and revealing about melancholy that makes discovering its layers and responding to its honesty rewarding to the speaker.

The next interruption of the speaker’s isolation is not a person but rather a sound, an “interrupted cry” (Line 8) that comes over the darkened houses “from another street” (Line 9). This is not like the patrolman strolling past. This is not a person; this is just a sound effect. The speaker regards even the sound of another person as an intrusion. He is not curious about the cry. Rather, he coolly leaves to that unnamed and unnamable Other the integrity of their own isolation. The speaker is content because the shout is not to him, about him, or for him. He thus returns to his late-night thoughts.

The imposing illuminated clock tower in Stanza 4 reminds the speaker that because time is always moving he must return from his walk, that he cannot stay out in the welcoming dark and the enveloping quiet because, with a sigh, he knows he has responsibilities to meet and promises to keep. The clock tower returns the speaker to the reality his perambulation is momentarily suspended. In that confusing and contradictory world, with its interminable cycle of expectation and disappointment, there is no right time, no wrong time (Line 13), just the unstoppable indifferent movement of time itself. The speaker will return home, certainly, he knows that. But he reassures himself in the closing line that that night, his old friend, will be waiting for his inevitable return to its welcoming embrace.

It is not that the speaker revels in his lamentations. Frost, at 50, after surviving numerous family tragedies, professional setbacks, as well as his own genetic predisposition to depression and even suicidal ideations, looks about that night world and says to the night with a crooked, perpetually ironic smile, “Is that all you got?”