The mood is set to express Shakespeare's feelings toward his lover. Shakespeare creates a feeling of love and warmth with his sweet sequence, such as, "Thou art more lovely and more temperate"(line 2). Shakespeare depicts this tone with images of sunny summer days, heaven, gold, and nature as a whole. In comparison, "Acquainted with the Night" has a somber tone with which Frost describes the "night." He does not describe the night with bright city lights and a sky full of glittering stars, as the reader would imagine. Rather he illustrates this effect with the melancholy images of rain, a sad city lane, and a lonely watchman. These images of sadness and solitude create a mellow mood. The title itself, "Acquainted with the Night," suggests that the speaker's mood is calmed by the darkness as he walks to the "farthest city light"(line 3). The night is his cover and a type of disguise as he walks "by the watchman on his beat," where he promptly dropped his "eyes unwilling to explain"(lines 5-6). The softest tone in the poem is when he, "stood still and stopped the sound of feet." At this point all things stop to show the narrator's intense contemplation (line 7). Frost portrays a smooth sound of the narrator's journey through the city in order to express the theme of the poem.
The eminent theme in Shakespearean sonnets is love and romance, which is the same in "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Shakespeare's form develops a sequence of metaphors, or ideas in each quatrain and the couplet offers a summary of these ideas. The title opens with a question addressed to the lover, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The rest of the sonnet is devoted to this comparison. The main idea expressed is how the lover is different from summer because the lover's beauty will never fade or die. In the couplet, the speaker explains that the beloved's beauty will be preserved in the poem, which will last for "as long as men breathe or eyes can see"(line 13).
