Introduction
The sonnet Acquainted with the Night is very sad and not like the usual you expect from Frost. It is sad almost to the point of depression and is nearly empty of any mention of nature. His poetry is usually placed in more rural surroundings, and the night and darkness are friendly. In this poem, the night is decidedly scary and the darkness may be dangerous. The poem was written around the time when two of Frost’s daughters were having trouble, and he, himself, may have been suffering from depression. There are opinions that this poem is about death, but it is really a search for the meaning in life.
Main text
The form of the poem is a quite complicated and well-crafted sonnet. The rhyme scheme is interlocking terza rima, and the rhythm is a perfect iambic pentameter. This was not a poem composed at one sitting and must have taken considerable time to perfect. It begins and ends with the same sentence and uses first person singular throughout, making it singularly introspective and self-centered. Yet, it is not centered on self in indulgence, but more in sorrow and loneliness, and coming to terms with depression.
Frost may have had a very satisfying life, but it was fraught with trouble and there was a history in his family of depression, which may have been a major factor in the loss of two of his children. So we can understand if this poem has very serious undertones. He does not mention in this poem that he used the night in many poems, but in his rural poetry, the night was friendly and warm, enclosing and protective. In this poem the night is filled with rain, cries and sad lanes.
Frost ends the first stanza with the statement that he has “outwalked” the furthest city light. We can assume from this that he walks the night often and goes out into the surrounding darkness at times. Stanza 2 begins with his statement that he has, “looked down the saddest city lane”. Note that it is singular, so we are being told that he knows which one is the saddest, but we do not know why or even if he has ever entered there.
There could be much speculation about the watchman, who or what it is and why it is there. However, it is more important than he looks down, unwilling to explain. What is the unwilling to explain? It might be his constant presence in the night. Many night creatures in the city are taking advantage of darkness to mask their activities. The creatures which populate the dark streets are not always good, but creatures of shadow and evil.
That is why most people do not venture out at night, aside from actually needing or being able to sleep. That is another possibility for this poem. Depression often brings on insomnia, and Frost may have suffered from this, especially in cities, where he was out of his element. That supports the repeated first line and the somber theme. Someone who cannot sleepwalks, or paces, in order to pass the time.
The third stanza shows us just how alone he is, since he hears cries over the housetops, then stops, and the sound of footsteps stops with him. There are no others around. The closest sign of life is a cry over the houses from another faraway street. Even the cry is unfinished, interrupted, like his sleep.
We know he is alone, because he says that the cry is not for him, not to call him back or say goodbye. It is a stranger far away. He is tracking the time by the moon, his luminary clock at an unearthly height. It is the same moon that would accompany him on beautiful night walks in the country, making his current surroundings that much more unfriendly.
The last two lines hold the power of this poem. This luminary clock “proclaims the time is neither wrong nor right.” So it is not being out at night that is the problem, but where he is out at night. He is far from home, alone and depressed to the point of insomnia. He repeats the first line to let us know that he is not a passing acquaintance with night, and now he has seen the other side of what was benevolent at home. He has seen all sides of the night and has definitely been one acquainted with the night.
The Mirror
Sylvia Plath’s poem, The Mirror, is not as dark, though just as sad. It talks about the subject of perception and aging from the more serious perspective of an impartial objective observer: the mirror. However, impartiality does not mean kind, and this mirror is not kind. It is like a perfectionist, though, in being exact. It claims not to be cruel either, but the result is painful. The second line personifies the mirror even more in that it “swallows what it sees.
Plath did not see it as giving back in reflection, but as somehow taking from the image in the act of swallowing it. She simply states it is the eye of a “little god”, which hints at demigod, and these are generally quite cruel, because they are jealous of the real gods. This poem is commonly believed to be about Plath’s contemplation of suicide, but it would be a big stretch. However, if we consider the idea of the mirror and the woman to be a metaphor it would fit.
It is interesting that Plath was careful to make the mirror rectangular and not the more perfect oval. Film is rectangular, and would be a long strip of images, perhaps of Plath’s life, over and over again. In a way she hints that the mirror sees the opposite wall as more perfect than other images, since it does not change. So the mirror can meditate upon it and it has become part of its heart. However, it seems not to like that other thing come between them as it says that faces and darkness “separate us over and over”. The words “over and over” hint at displeasure, which is logical if it is being separated from part of its heart.
The next stanza expands the metaphor of the mirror into a lake that does not give up its secrets. We see that the woman is looking for who she really is, which Plath may have been doing in her poetry. It calls the moon and candles liars, because they soften the signs of age and are kind to how a woman looks. These could also be the liars around her, whom she felt were mere flatterers. Somehow, the mirror begins to seem innocent, as it puts the fault on the woman who returns its faithfulness and honesty with tears and agitation, because all she sees is age when she seeks the youth which must have been important to her. It hints that the woman uses the mirror more regularly than before and looks to find something lost: the young girl she drowned in the lake of the mirror.
The last image is so evocative that we can picture the image of the old woman rising up from the depths of the mirror as the young girl approaches it and leaping toward her like a fish chasing a flying insect. Just as the fish seldom catches the insect it chases, it continues to leap at it. In this image it is the young girl inside the body of the old woman who feels like she is chased by that terrible image that leaps out at her every morning like a terrible fish. We do not see any other indications of emotion except these images and from them we understand that the woman is deeply disturbed by what she sees. Her youth is gone forever, swallowed by the mirror and yet, she keeps looking for it.
Both of these poems are about loneliness, and they allude to death. It is easier to see in Frost’s poem, especially if you have read his other work. However, in Plath’s poem, we never see any but her face, because she is alone.
How is identity constructed in poetry? How can we represent identity through language, through poetry as a medium?
The same two poems are excellent examples of constructed identity. Without knowing who the poet was we would know their gender. Race is not apparent there as it is in the poems by Langston Hughes, but class is easier to guess from the contents. Poetry cannot help but represent identity, because of its nature, but the impact can be increased with careful use of language.
The symbols used in these two poems are very middle class, a mirror and a dark city at night. Even the rising terrible fish in Plath’s poem is decidedly middle class as an image. There is really no hint in these two poems to race, but the language is very standard, while race is almost always present in the poems of Hughes. Langston Hughes even uses African-American vernacular in many of his poems, even using different regional dialects of what is now termed “ebonics”. The identities of these three poets determined the contents of their poetry, because it determined the values of their lives and generally contained those things and images which were important to them. We can see Frost’s search of meaning in life, while Plath searched for identity and Hughes searched for answers to social injustice.
Frost uses a very restricted form for his poem, the sonnet, and even selects a very difficult linked terza-rima in order to restrict it even more. This encloses the poem, restricting it within the form, and matches how he must have felt somehow trapped in the city. Plath was trapped in her mirror, trapped within the life she made for herself and somehow could not embrace. Hughes, on the other hand was trapped his entire life within the body of a visible minority and yet, he used complete freedom in his poetry. He adopted the two-sided conversational rhythm of jazz to his poetry, varying lines and even meter as he moved through a subject or a story, as in the two poems: Lennox Avenue: Midnight and Song for Dark Girl.
When we read poetry we often understand many things about the poet through his or her voice, imagery and subject matter. Much of this is subliminal, unless it is so obvious that it is impossible to escape. We identify gender in much of Plath’s work and class in much of Frost’s, while it is impossible to escape racial undertones in most of the work of Langston Hughes. Poets use poetry to express their deepest feeling. It is not surprising that this communicates a great deal about their identity. Sometimes, as with Plath or Hughes, it is the very reason they write.
Works Consulted
Robert Frost biographical information, 2008, Robert Frost: America’s Poet. Web.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Henry Holt, 1930. Web.
Greenberg, Robert A., and James G. Hepburn, eds. Robert Frost, an Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961. Questia. Web.
Hughes, Langston, 192?, Lennox Avenue: Midnight, Song for a Dark Girl Juten, Nancy Lewis, and John Zubizarreta, eds. The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Questia. Web.
Sutton, William A., ed. Newdick’s Season of Frost : An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost /. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1976. Questia. Web.