19 pages • 38 minutes read
Acquainted with the Night
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Symbols & Motifs
Rain
The poem is set on a rainy night, although the motivation for why the speaker selects a rainy night for his walk is never made clear. Given the lack of urgency to the walk itself, no indication of a direction or a destination, the speaker chooses to walk in the rain. Nor does the speaker seem particularly bothered by the showers and makes no mention of any umbrella or raincoat.
In keeping with the poem’s sense of contrapuntal readings, the rain symbolizes a dreary and forbidding environment, uninviting and depressing. Rain suggests a world in tears, a sad and forlorn landscape that forbids the radiant energy of stars and the moon.
Rain suggests a therapeutic cleansing as well, a ritual baptism in which the poet in his meandering perambulations is actually reinvigorated by his time apart, his stroll alone. Rain washes over the speaker. Rain can be reanimating. After all, rain ends droughts (suggested most notably in the closing section of The Waste Land by fellow Modernist and American expatriate T. S. Eliot); rain promises a return to fertility; rain, within the natural world that is so much an element of Frost’s poetic vision given his love of his adopted New England landscape, is a harbinger of recovery and growth.
Thus, the rain symbolizes the speaker’s determination to go on after a moment’s dark meditation and introspection (a strategy Frost echoes in his iconic 1923 poem “Stopping by Woods”). That rain symbolizes spiritual melancholy as well as a burst of animation and a renewed dedication to the work of living sustains Frost’s carefully balanced argument.
The Watchman
The watchman is the only other presence in the poem. But that presence is shrouded in mystery and suggestion. A watchman traditionally is associated with a security guard assigned to patrol a building when it is not in operation. But this watchman, apparently, is strolling about the night streets of the city. Perhaps then the term is applied to a patrol officer manning his “beat,” an anachronism for the neighborhood a police officer secures on foot.
The term then is unsettling, symbolizing how the sudden and unexpected reality of another person rattles the speaker. In keeping with the poem’s subtle affirmation of the poet’s isolation, the watchman, whether a security officer or a night patrolman, symbolizes exactly what the speaker does not want or need: protection.
Thus, despite the assumption that a person out alone at night would welcome a visit with someone to affirm human connection, particularly a figure of reassuring authority and protection, the speaker here disdains the watchman as an intrusive presence in what had been to that moment the speaker’s night, his world, his moments apart: “I drop my eyes, unwilling to explain” (Line 6). No explanation is given. It is enough that the speaker moves on, preserving his autonomy/isolation.
The Clock Tower
In Line 13, the speaker notes that the solitary intrusion against the night’s darkness is a “luminary clock,” a gaudy illuminated clock face high above the street, its face with its grim revelation of the exact time set “against the sky” (Line 12). The clock tower interrupts the walk. That single light, at its “unearthly height” (Line 11), rudely shatters the night’s rich, harmonious dark. That it insists on bringing time into the speaker’s nocturnal strolling further symbolizes the clock tower as an intrusion of the real world from which the speaker has so gratefully excused himself.
Because the rain has cloaked the stars and the moon and even obscured the city streetlamps, the bold rectangle of the clock face alone disturbs the night’s dark. Darkness can suggest gloom and melancholy, certainly, but it as well can suggest introspection and the welcome relief from the hard glare of illumination. Safe from the garish intrusive illumination associated with walking in the day, the speaker has sought exactly the comfort of the night’s inviting dark. Add to that the intrusive light here is a device intended to measure time and hence entangled with the oppressive awareness of our mortality, and the clock tower symbolizes the unforgiving buzzkill of the day-to-day busyness of the world from which the speaker so deliberately abandons for this time out.
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By Robert Frost
