Acquainted with the Night

“Acquainted with the Night” is and is not a sonnet; it is as well both homage to and parody of the terza rima form associated most notably with its inventor the Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and his epic narrative The Divine Comedy, about a pilgrim soul who at midlife learns the horrors of sin and the glorious reward of salvation and Paradise. Technically, the poem is a sonnet. It abides by the conventional 14-line form. The poem is executed in four tercets, or groups of three lines (terza rima means “third line” in Italian), and then a closing couplet. That Frost, a master of form, fractures the sonnet suggests his sly irreverent tone that helps obviate the poem’s apparent oppressive melancholy. Relax, the poem’s form says, it’s a walk in the rain.

The rhyme scheme is tricky. Terza rima as a poetic form is demanding. Frost, himself a student of prosody, against the generation of Modernists who came to embrace his work, advocated that the artistry of a poet expressed itself in conventional forms rather than in the experimental carelessness of open verse. In terza rima, the rhyme in the middle line of one tercet anticipates the dominant rhyming scheme of the next stanza. Terza rima follows a strict rhyming pattern: ABA BCB CDC DAD AA. The movement back and forth as end rhymes of one tercet anticipate the dominant rhyme of the next tercet creates a linked feeling. The formal structuring creates the narrative of Frost’s poem, how the speaker walks out into the night and then returns. That Frost invokes Dante’s form for his speaker’s night walk suggests at one level that the walk has dire cosmic implications of hell on earth but also suggests Frost might be having fun with such expectations.