Evaluation of Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night”

    The poet describes the feeling he gets when he walks at night, and some of the sensations and places that he has seen. The poem takes place somewhere on the edge of a lonely city. The speaker goes on a walk through the empty, abandoned part of town, hearing distant cries, but only seeing one other person, the watchman. He feels lonely because he hasn’t seen anyone around. He walks out of town and looks up at the sky and contemplates the moon and stars, comparing them to a clock.
    There are several devices used in this poem, such as rhyme scheme and alliteration. The devices are used to create a tone of loneliness and darkness. The ambient sounds in the poem, such as the distant scream, create the feeling that he is really alone out in the streets in the quiet night. The alliteration and assonance of the third stanza brings out this tone even more. The rhyme scheme is A,B,A,B until the third stanza which starts the same pattern but with two different rhyming sounds. This creates a two distinct sections of the poem. The first poses the setting; the second tells his thoughts and actions in a single moment on those streets. He talks of a “luminary clock” that could be the moon or just the sky in general.
     I see the main idea behind the poem as being one of loneliness. The poet is describing, through this one experience of night, the way he sometimes feels in real life. I don’t think I have ever felt that lonely, but I can imagine how it feels. The last and first line, “I have been one acquainted with the night,” shows me that he was once lonely but is no longer. I really like the image of the “interrupted cry” because it really sets the scene of a large city, because that’s what you hear in the rundown neighborhoods of a large city. All in all, this poem is a manifestation of the emotion loneliness, and how it effects the speaker.