While the light shines in the day, the powers of darkness reign in the night. Emily Dickinson’s darkness and Robert Frost’s night are in many ways similar to each other. To both the poets, the absence of light metaphorically represents their loneliness, exposure and uncertainty to the unknown. However, the poems differ because each poet grasps the darkness and night with different meaning to themselves. While Dickinson focuses on being accustomed to the darkness which she is new to, Frost focuses on his lonely contemplation of his already existing acquaintance with the night. Both the poets have used their vivid point of views, auditory and tactile imagery and structure to correspond their experience with the darkness and night.

    In the poem, Emily Dickinson describes a loss in detail using a group point of view about darkness. Dickinson’s style portrays the darkness as an object replacing the “lamp” of her life. She says the darkness is a hard phenomenon to comprehend without light because she is lonely, exposed and uncertain about her next step. Unlike Frost, Dickinson clearly indicates that she is only newly being “accustomed to the dark.” That is the reason why she says even “the bravest-grope a little-” because she has no idea where to go and what to do. Dickinson uses strong tactile imagery such as “directly in the forehead” to give a sense the uncertainty about the future. In addition, the imagery of the tree represents a wall that the poet is facing, but Dickinson uses a tree to portray a wall because a tree is round in shape and she will be able to get around it, which she does. Emily Dickinson describes this darkness in a first person point of view in order to show that the poem is meant to be interpreted not only by her, but also by others who might have lost something important in their life, and whom now must try to live in the darkness.

However, unlike Dickinson, Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” is a poem showing his daily walk in and with the night. This captivating poem describes Frost as a person who is already accustomed to the night and has good knowledge about it. Frost’s personal and first person point of view explains his intimate acquaintance with the night through the past tense of the very first line, “I have been one acquainted with the night”. Unlike Dickinson, this experience is not his first, he is alone and he is quite certain about what the night will bring sadness. Through the course of the poem, Frost describes and explains both the sadness and darkness of the night because of walking everyday with it. Frost auditory imagery of the rain describes his melancholic composure. His structure portrays him as a man leaving the city in the dark with forlorn attitude. His imagery of the moon as a luminary clock only augments his gloomy path because is now, a lone wolf.

The significance of the dark and the night vary to the poets. While Dickinson tries to get accustomed to the dark for the first time because the loss of her lamp, Frost already has a established relationship with the night. They are alike because they are both in a period of the day where they feel lonely and gloomy because of the absence of light and the presence of darkness. While the presence of darkness might me metaphorical to Dickinson, it is literal to Frost.