Acquainted Night

Robert Frost’s “Acquainted With the Night” begins with the instantly recognizable scene of a man walking out into the raining night, without any apparent destination in mind. This cliche picture is almost universally seen as portraying someone who is depressed because they feel they have failed at something, or perhaps something horrible has happened to them, such as the loss of a family member. The speaker in this poem is afflicted with the first option. He writes of how he took a step back and looked at the world around him as an outsider. In doing so he feels as though he hasn’t made any satisfying impact with his life, and that his time is passing him by, and he is wasting it. The poem’s rhyme scheme throughout, save for the last two lines,
is ABA BCB CDC, etc. Each first and third line in a stanza rhymes, and the second line rhymes with following stanzas first and third lines, and the pattern continues.This rhyme scheme’s interlocking nature in some ways evokes the image of interlocking gears, always turning and progressing, in perfect rhythm. The whole poem is this way, save for the last two lines, to show that the world continuously moves, rhythmically and orderly, never pausing. However, while the world moves on and time passes by, the speaker in the poem goes out into the night, to be away from the rhythm, so he can step back and take in what's happening around him. The speaker therefore talks in a observational form of the past tense, as he has distanced himself from the present, and is merely being an onlooker of life, not a participant in it.
In addition to the estrangement of the present being shown by the tense of the poem, The separation is also shown when the speaker says “I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet”. The repetition of “st” in the first half of the line emulates the sound of his footsteps, until he stops walking. The rhythmic walking goes with the rhythmic progression of the world and time, until he stops walking, because he wants to view the world as an outsider. In doing so, he gets and unbiased view of life, a behind-the-scenes view of existence, from which he can truly assess what happens.
When the speaker has “outwalked the furthest city light” and “stood still” to have an unobstructed view of what life is really like, it is seen that he hasn’t made any impact with his life. When an “interrupted cry” is made, the speaker realizes that it is “not to call me back or say goodbye” as he hasn’t made a difference in the world. He has not affected anything, or done anything of substance with his life, so the cry passes him by unaffected, for the speaker has done nothing. In addition to the cry not interacting with the speaker, nothing else does throughout the course of the poem. That is, except for the watchman.
The watchman in the poem moves “on his beat”, with the “beat” being another example of the rhythm seen throughout the poem.
The watchman is a human representation of time, as a clock or “watch”, and his metronomal “beat”. The speaker says he “passed by the watchman.” He passed by the watchman, and the watchman passed by him, because time itself was “passing by” the speaker. When under the watchman's gaze, the speaker says he “dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” The ‘t speaker can’t bring himself to admit to time that he had wasted it, so he keeps his head down. In addition to the watchman, time comes into play again at the end of the poem. Even though the speaker “outwalked the furthest city light” and is isolated in the dark. One bright light is persistently pervasive. Even though he has walked far beyond the city, “luminary clock” still brightly glares at the speaker, reminding him that time is passing him by, and that “the time was neither wrong nor right.” Is was neither wrong nor right, as the speaker has not used his time wrongly nor rightly. He has simply done nothing impactful, and effected no one and nothing. Unfortunately for the speaker, time is passing him by, and soon he will be unable to make a satisfying impact on the world, as he so
desires.