Acquainted with the Night is a good poem to show English language learners the present perfect, that period of time in the past that comes right up to the present but remains unspecified: “I’ve walked a mile.” “But when?” The simple past comes to an end: we know when: “I walked a mile last night.” “Last night. That’s when.” The present perfect has happened, and the expectation in this sonnet is that it will continue to happen, endless as heaven or hell, the agony never be over like Sisyphus and his stone again and again and again.

Frost worked very hard on this poem for it to get its natural flow of lines so cleverly rhymed: ABA BCB CDC DADA AA, a sonnet written strictly in iambic pentameter; students can get a feel for the flow of the language (English is very comfortable with iambic pentameter) and listen for the rhymes becoming familiar with the sounds.

I’m afraid I was a little hard on Robert Frost last week. I called him cranky. “What’s wrong with cranky?” my friend Patricia asked. And even worse, I’d called him back-stabbing when in fact he might have been more like an animal in pain who bites the hand that cares for it. When I was a teenager, I heard a story from an English professor who had been a friend of Robert Frost. Once when visiting the poet at his home a group of women knocked wanting the poet to autograph the books they’d brought. Frost did, and waved goodbye to them as they left him standing on the porch confiding to the professor, “I wish the old bitches would leave me alone.” Whatever you say about him, Robert Frost has looked beyond the apple picking and the swinging birches and come back to tell us about it. Frost knew sadness, depression, and though competitive with the best of them, he was well aware that anything he did, no matter who read it or said it, one day would vanish back into the vast abyss. And that’s Frost’s gift, not apple blossoms but nothingness, the futility of anything. Daughters become whores, sons commit suicide, wives refuse to forgive you on their death beds, every friend’s an enemy who wants your place on Parnassus—Trust no one! He’s a man whose own feet are not his own: “I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet.” Whose feet? He can’t connect with them anymore than the cry he hears can connect with him. Like Prufrock whose mermaids sing each to each, but not to him (how sad), no one calls or cries for Robert Frost at the edge of town as he walks into the dark.

Acquainted with the Night

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.