This Italian Sonnet style is most often used for frothy romantic love poems, but Frost uses the three line rhyme scheme in four stanzas v/s and finishes with a couplet, aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ff. This poem can be likened to the works of Dante who uses the terza rima style in his work the Divine Comedy. In the Inferno, Dante also covers similar dark themes of isolation and depression. Alluding to Dante was also perhaps, Frost's knowing wink to his more literary readers who, he believed would have noted the similarity. This seems to echo the clash between the meaning of the language of Frost's poetry says and what it actually means. Acquainted with the Night seems on the surface to be one of his more straightforward works. But that it seems a simple tale of bleakness and solitude is at once both true and false, I have re-read this poem several times and have even now, not finally settled on, or accepted that I know if there can be just one true analysis of this poem. Perhaps that is the enduring strength of Frost's work; it can be whatever the reader sees in it, at the time that they read it. Yes it is a tale of bleakness, but how bleak? It is at once, a tale of a person who is in a self imposed isolation, (although some critics see it as the story of a homeless person) deliberately rejecting society, seemingly due to chronic depression, someone who is living with and accepting of his or her situation. But then again it can at times read as if that same person, is now stepping past this stage of acceptance of their situation, now embracing thoughts of suicide, is the person seeking an end to their loneliness, or an end to their life? Overall I come down on the side of a tentative, but never final resignation to life by this person. I say this person, because at no time are we given information that tells us the sex of the narrative persona. We assume the narrator is male because the poet is male and has a history of depression; and the writing is so moving, sincere and personal that it must be autobiographical.
