Acquainted Night

Robert Frost’s “Acquainted With the Night” begins with the instantly recognizable scene of a man walking out into the raining night, without any apparent destination in mind. This cliche picture is almost universally seen as portraying someone who is depressed because they feel they have failed at something, or perhaps something horrible has happened to them, such as the loss of a family member. The speaker in this poem is afflicted with the first option. He writes of how he took a step back and looked at the world around him as an outsider. In doing so he feels as though he hasn’t made any satisfying impact with his life, and that his time is passing him by, and he is wasting it. The poem’s rhyme scheme throughout, save for the last two lines,
The watchman is a human representation of time, as a clock or “watch”, and his metronomal “beat”. The speaker says he “passed by the watchman.” He passed by the watchman, and the watchman passed by him, because time itself was “passing by” the speaker. When under the watchman's gaze, the speaker says he “dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.” The ‘t speaker can’t bring himself to admit to time that he had wasted it, so he keeps his head down. In addition to the watchman, time comes into play again at the end of the poem. Even though the speaker “outwalked the furthest city light” and is isolated in the dark. One bright light is persistently pervasive. Even though he has walked far beyond the city, “luminary clock” still brightly glares at the speaker, reminding him that time is passing him by, and that “the time was neither wrong nor right.” Is was neither wrong nor right, as the speaker has not used his time wrongly nor rightly. He has simply done nothing impactful, and effected no one and nothing. Unfortunately for the speaker, time is passing him by, and soon he will be unable to make a satisfying impact on the world, as he so