First published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1928, today’s poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963) takes up the dark undercurrent hinted at in his famous 1923 poem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which ran as Poem of the Day last fall.

In that earlier poem, the speaker who gazes on the dark beauty of the winter woods feels the deadly pull — but also feels the counterweight of his own “promises to keep,” which recall him to life.

“Acquainted With the Night” sounds as though it has the same speaker, but one who has seen the darkness for what it is, without the hypnotic beauty of those snowy woods.

His is a grittier urban darkness, where the clean cover of snow has been dissolved in rain. Each successive stanza moves him, and by extension the reader, closer to the heart of that terrible night in the heart of the city.

From its outskirts, where he has “outwalked the furthest city light,” the speaker penetrates deeper and deeper into the dark lanes, filled with disembodied voices of misery and alienation, until at last he arrives at the clock which has stopped, signaling that time itself is irrelevant.

The poem’s form, a sonnet in terza rima, amplifies the muted horror of the scene. This is Dante’s form, the form of the “Divine Comedy,” the very stanzas by which his poetic counterpart descends into hell and returns from it.

By the time Frost’s speaker proclaims, again, that he has “been one acquainted with the night,” we understand that night as the black eternity of the soul in torment — from which, like Dante, Frost’s man returns with more wisdom than he had when he stood looking at the dark trees in the snow. 

Acquainted With the Night
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.