Acquainted With The Night

Starting off with the basic general form of the poem can give great insight into the overall meaning of the poem Acquainted with The Night. Sonnet’s are a very significant form of poetry with a set structure and yet this poem has a very unique form and presentation of content. The stanza of a poem is essentially the poem itself; it just separates content to make a more meaningful poem. In Acquainted with The Night, Frost uses four tercet stanzas and one couplet stanza marked aba, bcb, cdc, dad, aa. It also includes 14 stanzas of iambic pentameter which is the reason it is considered a sonnet. Generally, he doesn’t use this form in his poetry, the reason behind this might be that he is using terza rima to show the past within the future or to show that there is a circle within this particular poem just like the object he is speaking about, the moon. Frost also could be using this circularity to suggest that this walk he does in the night has occurred more than just once. He then ends the poem with a two-line stanza, this is because he wants
For this poem he uses a near perfect iambic pentameter. This means each line has 10 syllables, which are arranged so that one unstressed syllable is followed by a stresses syllable. For example, the stressed syllables in this line are bold and in italic “I have been one ac-quaint-ed with the night.” The way Frost writes this is very difficult and could account for some of the strange sounding ways that he phrases his lines. Although it is strange, it actually plays a key part in the structure of this poem. The steady syllable rhythm is almost the sound of footsteps when you say it aloud. This connects with the poem in the fact that he is walking around at night by himself, maybe to only hear the sound of his footsteps. He is using this syllable extension to give the reader a sense of being with him walking through the streets that he is talking