A Vicious Cycle

"Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost

As a huge Frost fan, this poem interested me the most out of the six we studied this week.  It appeals, in a sympathetic way, to those people feeling depressed, forgotten, and unloved.  Frost's speaker expresses extraordinary sorrow in the poem, setting a melancholy mood immediately.  He repeats the phrase "I have" before listing a series of gloomy, saddening acts from walking alone in the rain to peering down an ominous city street (Frost 976).  He express shame, or possibly apathy toward the world, as he describes walking past a policeman with his head hung low, "unwilling to explain" his sorrow (Frost 976).  The only glimmer of hope in the poem comes when the speaker stops because he thinks he is being called.   Sadly, he only heard an "interrupted cry" completely unintended for him and destroying any hope for happiness he may have had (Frost 976).  Thus, the whole poem reinforces the speaker's depression, and the second to last line amplifies it by adding confusion.  The line reads, "[The clock] proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right," which emphasizes a world without moral judgment, confusing the speaker and leaving him lost as to how he should break his depression (Frost 976).  He can't escape his sadness.  Therefore, Frost ends the poem with the same depressing line he began it with, "I have been acquainted with the night", to reinforce the speaker's entrapment in his melancholy (Frost 976).