"Acquainted with the Night" is a

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

by Robert Frost. It first appeared in the Autumn, 1928 issue of ''

The Virginia Quarterly Review The ''Virginia Quarterly Review'' is a quarterly literary magazine that was established in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, at the request of University of Virginia president E. A. Alderman. This ''"National Journal of Literature and Discussion" ...

'' and was republished that year in his collection '' West-Running Brook''.

Poem

Interpretation and form

The poem is most often read as the poet/narrator's admission of having experienced depression and a vivid description of what that experience feels like. In this particular reading of the poem, "the night" is the depression itself, and the narrator describes how he views the world around him in this state of mind. Although he is in a city, he feels completely isolated from everything around him. The poem is written in strict

iambic pentameter Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iam ...

, with 14 lines like a sonnet, and with a

terza rima ''Terza rima'' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rh ...

("third rhyme") rhyme scheme, which follows the complex pattern of: aba bcb cdc dad aa. Terza rima was invented by the Italian poet

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: '' ...

for his epic poem ''

The Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature an ...

''. Because Italian is a language in which many words have vowel endings, terza rima is much less difficult to write in Italian than it is in English. Because of its difficulty, very few writers in English have attempted the form. However, Frost was a master of many forms, and "Acquainted with the Night" is one of the most famous examples of an American poem written in terza rima.

Publication history

The poem first appeared in the Autumn, 1928 issue of ''

'' edited by James Southall Wilson. It was republished that year by Henry Holt and Company in the poetry collection '' West-Running Brook''.''West-Running Brook''. 1928 first edition. gutenberg.ca.
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References

Sources

*Nancy Lewis Tuten; John Zubizarreta (2001). ''The Robert Frost Encyclopedia''. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-29464-8. *Jay Parini (2000). ''Robert Frost: A Life''. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-6341-7. *Jeffrey Meyers (1996). ''Robert Frost: A Biography''. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395856031.

External links

Excerpt from a close reading of "Acquainted with the Night"
{{Robert Frost Poetry by Robert Frost 1928 poems Works originally published in American magazines Works originally published in literary magazines Modernist poems American poems Poems in terza rima