Last night I walked out with our dog Molly, and looked up into the clear southeastern sky, where I saw that wonderful constellation Orion, so bright, and Sirius the brightest of stars in our earthly view, and farther to the east and a bit higher, along the ecliptic, brighter than Sirius and glowing steadily with its jovial white with a suggestion of yellow, Jupiter, and it was beautiful — there is a beauty to the night. I miss that beauty when I am surrounded by the glare of electric lights that do not so much uplift the heart as they depress the dome above us, just as the now constant piped-in music and chatter you can’t get away from as you are trying to fill your car with gasoline does not so much arouse the hearing as block it up. It is the auditory analogue of what’s called “light pollution.” Night, quiet; the stars above, the breath of the slightest breeze in the trees; a wisp of cloud barely seen, or the trail of the Milky Way, with the “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” — these, strangely enough, comfort the heart, and make man feel at home in the universe, from the smallest grain of sand to its distant cousin the nebula of Andromeda.
And then there is the human darkness, the subject of our Poem of the Week. A second or third-rate poet might give us blank ignorance, or the foulest evil, but how easy then it would be for us to pat our own heads and say, “We’re not that way, we’re enlightened, we’re good, we bring daylight wherever we go!” But Frost instead gives us a series of suggestions, all the more powerful in that they are understated. Vagueness is usually a fault, but by no means always, and Frost was one of our greatest poets when it came to not saying things. “I have promises to keep,” says his man beside the woods on the snowy evening, and he does not say what they are. His Oven-Bird asks the question, “what to make of a diminished thing,” but that is the last line of the poem, and there is no answer.
So it seems to be here. Man carries his darkness about with him. The speaker walks out in the rain at night, when I suppose nobody with a happy motive would do so, and comes back when it is still raining. He passes by the watchman on his beat, and drops his eyes, as if he were guilty — of what? We don’t know. Mostly we keep our darkness hidden from ourselves, but there are times when it seems that guilt, not for any certain crime, but just for being as we are, betrays us into a moment of honesty, which passes as quickly as does the image of the watchman. He has walked down “the saddest city lane.” A lane cannot be sad, can it? But the shards of human life can be — a broken bottle, the scrap of a newspaper, weeds slowly crumbling the brick base of an apartment building nobody keeps trim anymore, a baseball with its stitches undone, garbage left carelessly to small creatures of crevices and shadows — evidence of futility, or resignation, or some unspecifiable human trouble.
The night he describes is one for the ears as well as the eyes. He has stopped his own footsteps when “an interrupted cry / Came over houses from another street.” A cry of what? Physical pain? Sorrow? Fear? But it is far away, not even in the same street, and it is interrupted, as if some dreaded hand had stifled the cry in someone else’s mouth. What can be done about it? And he lifts his eyes above, where there is no sky, there are no stars, but the luminous face of a clock with the time on it, a time that is neither wrong nor right. It is as if the speaker himself were a clock out of time with the universe, if the universe has a time to be in or out of. And then he repeats the first line, “I have been one acquainted with the night.” When he said it at first, we think that he is going to describe what he has experienced, outside of himself. When he says it at the end, we know also that he means something within himself. And “acquainted”? It’s an understated word, and one that we use lightly, not to describe any profound relation. Here the understatement appears deliberate and ironic. It is more than an acquaintance.
A note about the form of the poem. It has 14 lines, so you might be justified in supposing that it’s going to be a sonnet. It is not. It is divided into tercets, rhyming with the terza rima pattern that Dante invented for his Trinitarian poem, the Divine Comedy. I don’t think that Frost had Purgatory or Paradise in mind here, though. It’s Inferno, rather, or a suggestion of it. The tercets interlock, as in Dante, rhyming ABA BCB CDC DED, and then, if we were following Dante precisely, we would round off the end of the poem as he rounds off his cantos, with a single rhyming line at the end, thus: ABA BCB CDC DEDE. That would give us 13 lines. But Frost didn’t want that. He wanted, if I may venture a guess, to weld together Dante’s meter with the sonnet, and he rounds off the poem by repeating the first line, as an “extra” line, powerful in its plain and self-contained statement. Was the old Florentine poet acquainted with the night? “So am I,” says Frost.
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Learn more about our subscription tiers by clicking the button below.
