Robert Frost is famous for his poems about the landscape of New England and the kind of life its inhabitants led. Written in simple, accessible language, this rather traditional poet, who eschewed the new popular poetic forms of his times, often wrote dark, existential poems on universal themes. "Acquainted With the Night," a poem of loneliness, is a terza rima sonnet which complements the theme in a number of ways.
A sonnet, is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter-each line has five groups of two syllables, and the stress falls on the second syllable of each group. There are different sonnet forms; some are more common than others. Frost chose, with good reason, the unusual terza rima sonnet. Unlike the common sonnet forms, the terza rima sonnet is primarily composed in groups of three lines of poetry. The first and third lines rhyme, and the second line rhymes with the first and third of the next stanza. Like all sonnets, the poem ends with a pair of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter.
This poem tells of a person who walks alone, at night. This is a lonely image, which leads to most of the imagery in the poem to be dark, both literally (the night) and figuratively "saddest city lane", and lonely, hearing a call that is for someone else. The final image of the poem is of a "luminary clock" at a n "unearthly height," known as the moon. This clock "proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right," which seems to imply that the narrator, while walking, is actually searching for answers. Why else would he comment on the moon's lack of answers? It would seem that the isolated narrator is out searching, perhaps trying to figure out where he belongs in the world. .
Though sonnets are usually written in groups of four lines, or with no space between the lines at all, Frost uses three to isolate the stanzas so there is more white space on the page, which contributes to the reader's experience of isolation.
