Point of View

“Acquainted with the Night” is written in first-person point of view using the pronoun “I.” In fact, seven out of the fourteen total lines, including the first five which open the poem, begin with this word (this is an example of anaphora). This keeps the poem’s focus on the speaker’s experience, rather than the external world. Although the poem uses a vibrant cityscape as its backdrop, its key message is about the internality of the speaker: their loneliness and isolation, their struggle with their own inner darkness. Each of the stanzas references the first-person speaker in some way, connecting each sensory detail to the way it affects and is affected by their personal lens.

Language and Meaning

Like the majority of Robert Frost’s poems, this poem uses colloquial, accessible language that is easily within reach for most readers. The majority of the...