the death of Henry Sweetser), "Death's Waylaying not the sharpest" (J1296/Frl3l5; occasioned

by the disappearance of Joseph A. Sweetser), "How know it from a Summer's Day"

(J1364/Frl412; occasioned by Mary Channing Higginson's terminal illness), "How brittle are the
Piers" (J1433/Frl459; occasioned by the death of Mary Channing Higginson), "Than Heaven
more remote" (J l436/Frl460; occasioned by the death of Samuel Bowles), "The Face in Evanescence lain" (JI490/Frl521; occasioned by the death of Thomas Higginson's infant, Louisa),
"How much of Source escapes with thee" (J1517/Frl567; occasioned by the death of Josiah
Gilbert Holland), and "The Heart has many Doors," "Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light," "Expanse
cannot be lost," and "Climbing to reach the costly Hearts" (J1567/Frl623, J1564/Frl624,
J1584/Frl625, and J1566/Frl626; all occasioned by the death of Dickinson's nephew, Gilbert).
WORKS CITED
Deppman, Jed. "'I Could Not Have Defmed the Change': Rereading Dickinson's Definition Poetry." Emily Dickinson Joumai 11.1 (Spring 2002): 49-80.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum edition. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1998.

Frost's ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT

In Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, Riehard Poirier suggests that Robert
Frost's poems are often about the poet's proeessthe ehoices he has to
makein writing a poem. Poirier writes, "The Frost of the best-loved poems
is also the Frost who is simultaneously meditating, in a manner often unavailable to the casual reader, on the nature of poetry itself." Poirier uses "Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Mending Wall" as examples and points
out that the human dilemmas seen in these poems are "poetie ones" (7).
"Acquainted with the Night," similarly, is a poem that exemplifies Poirier's
suggestion that Frost's poems are about writing poems.
The journey motif in this poem asks its readers to analyze the allegorical
aspects of the poem. Kimberley H. Kidd, for example, suggests that the night
in the poem represents "the poet's own inner life, possibly self knowledge"
and that the poet "is acquainted but does not know" his inner self well. Kidd
maintains, "The poet's journey into the night, then, can be seen as ongoing
and continual, progressing to a more complete self-knowledge." This same
journey into the poet's inner self may represent the poet's exploration of the
unknown territory, a poetic experimentation that characterizes the height of
American modernism of Frost's time.
With its conventional symbol of the "night" in the title, opening line, and
the concluding line. Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" invites its readers to
examine death and grief expressed in the poem. Yet the "night" should not be
taken as a conventional symbol; rather, the darkness ofthe night represents the
symbols, form, and structure of a poem that no other poet has explored in the
39

past. Whereas the "city" and its "light" in line 3 represent civilized society or
traditional poetry, the darkness ofthe "night" in this poem represents the kind
of poems and its poetic devices that the speaker's predecessors have not yet
explored. Thus, "I have been one acquainted with the night" in the opening
and concluding lines, as well as "I have outwalked the furthest city light" (3),
express that the speaker-poet has experimented with new techniques. However, the speaker-poet has written experimental poems only on occasion, for he
claims, "I have walked out in rainand back in rain" (2). The speaker implies
that he has always come back to traditional poetry.
Whereas the first stanza of the poem presents the speaker as an experimental poet, the second stanza presents a slightly different side of the speaker. In
the second stanza, consisting of two complete sentences, the speaker-poet
calls the city lane, or traditional poetry, "the saddest" (4). While exploring the
unknown territory, the speaker poet has "passed by the watchman on his beat"
(5), but he could not meet the watchman's eyes and says, "And dropped my
eyes, unwilling to explain" (6). This watchman is the only other human character in the poem, but the speaker avoids human contact. Keat Murray
explains in his "Robert Frost's Portrait of a Modern Mind: The Archetypal
Resonance of 'Acquainted with the Night"':
The word "watchman" relies on the sense of sight. [. . .] And instrumental
to the watchman is his function at his post as the embodiment of conscience, or its visual sign. [. . .] The fact that the persona drops his eyes
from the watchman indicates a measure of guilt or reticence so dissonant
that it resounds with a din from his conscience all the way to God. (376)
This God-like watchman is also the speaker's conscience that tells him to stay
in the traditional paths, or those surrounding the speaker who remind him of
the safe paths. The watchman, on the other hand, can be a man in charge of a
watch, a timekeeper, so to speak, because time is another recurring symbol in
the poem. In the fourth stanza, the poet observes "One luminary clock against
the sky" (12), which is both the moon and a clock tower, and concludes in the
final couplet that "the time was neither wrong nor right" (13). That the speaker cannot make an eye contact with the timekeeper of poetic tradition and is
"unwilling to explain" (6) suggests that the speaker is not willing to explain
his urge to experiment.
In addition to the symbols of "Acquainted with the Night," the form of this
poem enhances Poirier's suggestion that Frost's poem is often about the creative process. Although the speaker is straying away from poetic tradition, he
is not completely out of its limits. "Acquainted with the Night" is written in a
terza rima sonnet, using four tercets of an interlocking three-line rhyme
scheme. In a Petrarchan sonnet, the natural thematic break often comes
between the first eight lines, octave, and the concluding six lines, sestet. In a
Shakespearean sonnet, the thematic break is frequently after three quatrains
40

and right before the concluding couplet. However, in "Acquainted with the
Night," the break comes prematurely at the end of the first two tercets. The
first sestet relies on the speaker's motion, such as "walked" (2), "outwalked"
(3), and "passed" (5); in the last octave, the speaker stops and ponders: "I have
stood still" (7). The first two stanzas consist of five complete sentences,
whereas the last three stanzas have only two complete sentencesone
expanding from line 7 to line 13, and the other on line 14. Unlike a Shakespearean sonnet, there is no break right before the concluding couplet because
line 12 serves as the subject of line 13: "One luminary clock against the sky /
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right" (12-13). While writing in a
terza rima sonnet, the speaker fractures the traditional thematic break in a sonnet very much like the speaker in "The Road Not Taken," who chooses the
path "less traveled by" (19).
By the third tercet, the speaker is near the city limits, where he can still hear
"an interrupted cry" (8) that comes "over houses from another street" (9). As
the speaker tries out the limits of conventional symbols and form, he realizes
that the cry he hears is "not to call [him] back or say good-by" (10). In short,
the speaker comes to the realization that there is no one, not even the watchman, to prevent him from exploring new possibilities in poetry. Indeed, the
watchman in the second tercet does not question the speaker as he passes by.
An alienation that the speaker must experience to create new, artistic poetry is
emphasized through the images of deserted streets, distant houses, and the
darkness that envelopes the whole civilization in the octave. This isolation is
heightened by the moon: "And further still at an unearthly height / One luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right"
(t t-13). In observing the moon, the speaker realizes that there is no right time
to create a new poem.
That creating a new poem is a continual trial and error is enhanced by the
seven present-perfect-tense statements that "Acquainted with the Night" contains. The speaker explored the unknown territory in the past, and though he
has come back to the familiar territory, he continues to go back to the
unknown. In this sense, the use of terza rima in this sonnet is appropriate: the
interlocking rhyme scheme gives the sense of continuation to the readers.
However, the speaker cannot resist experimenting with the traditional rhyme
scheme. Although the readers would expect the traditional terza rima of the
aba bcb cdc ded ee rhyme, "Acquainted with the Night" rhymes aba bcb cdc
dad aa, making a circular structure by repeating the opening line of the poem
at the end: "I have been one acquainted with the nighf (1, 14). This circular
structure of the poem, again, enhances the continuous nature of creating a
new poem.
Robert Frost is quoted as saying in 1962 in his talk titled "On Extravagance" that many of his poems have "literary criticism in themin them"
41

(Poirier 86; emphasis in original). Frost's literary criticism in "Acquainted

with the Night," then, might be directed toward his contemporary poets, who,
in modernizing poetry, strayed away from the closed-form poetry. Written at
the height of the American modernist movement in 1928, "Acquainted with
the Night" stresses the importance of pushing the boundaries and exploring
the unknown, while remaining within the limits of accepted tradition,
KYOKO AMANO, University of Indianapolis
Copyright 2006 Heldref Publications
WORKS CITED
Frost, Robert, "Acquainted with tiie Night," The Bedford Introduction to Literature 802,
, "The Road Not Tai<en." The Bedford Introduction to Literature 1000.
The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ed. Michaei Meyer. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martins, 2002.
Kidd, Kimberiey H. "Acquainted with the Night." Masterplots II: Poetry. Rev. ed. MagillOnLiterature Plus. 19 October 2006 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.
Murray, Keat. "Robert Frost's Portrait of a Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of
'Acquainted with the Night.'" Midwest Quarterly 41.4 (2000): 370-84.
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN

An analysis of pictorial representations in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
exposes the narrative's subtle iconographic framework, the symbolic schema
that functions alongside the actual events of the text. In his essay "The Symbolism of Vision," the critic Charles I. Glicksherg examines the images of
sight and blindness in Ellison's novel and suggests that the midcentury
African American writer
resorts to the use of symbolism [. . .] because only in that way, by employing that expressive and infinitely resourceful medium, can he hope to convey some notion of the life that [African Americans] are forced to lead in
the United States, [, . .] The symbols he uses as well as the way in which
he presents them will indicate the depth of his sensibility, the complexity
and richness of his talent, the range and power of his vision, (48)
Thus, symbolism became increasingly important for the progressive writer
who attempted to avoid the politically and racially charged criticism that
Richard Wright encountered after the publication of Native Son. Ellison,
therefore, in "a struggle to stare down the deadly and hypnotic temptation to
interpret the world and all its devices in terms of race" ("Shadow" xix).
42