Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night", is brief and told from the speaker's point of view. The speaker informs the audience that he knows the night very well, where he has taken many long walks even during the rain. In the poem, the speaker has walked passed other people, although he has never met their gaze because he would hate explaining why he is walking in the middle of the night alone. Frost repeats the phrase "I have been the one acquainted with the night", in the poem’s first line, as he ends his thoughts ( Frost, 1928) . This poetry explication argues that the poem illustrates Frost’s life that was full of loneliness, despair, and depression.
The brief poem revolves the audience into the mind of a poetic reviewing their life with a certain chill detachment. The poem illustrates a person who has discovered darkness, while journeying deep into their psyche, despite being on the streets with other people. The narrator could have used the night as a metaphor for loneliness, despair, and depression. The night could express the narrator’s inner world, but the poem’s language shows it could be any person that has ever battled detrimental challenges. The verse highly indicates the theme of loneliness and social isolation. Loneliness refers to the perceived deficit between desired and actual quantity and quality of relationships ( Malcolm, Frost, & Cowie, 2019) . Social isolation, on the other hand, is the accurately measured deficit in a person’s social relationships, usually quantified in terms of frequency or diversity of contacts and social network size. Both loneliness and social isolation critically impact a person's mental health status and makes individuals develop anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.
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The existing research does not clearly show the exact causes of depression. However, the contributing factors to depression include a combination of social, psychological, biological, and genetic factors (Direct, 2019). Some individuals have a high risk of developing depression because of their biology, genes, or personality type. Due to the genetic factor, people with a history of depression in their close family members have high chances of developing depression. Negative events, such and losing a job or receiving bad news can trigger depression (Direct, 2019). Certain personality types, such as low self-esteem are also more prone to developing depression.
Frost’s poem addresses themes of existence, insomnia, alienation, isolation, homelessness, and depression. In the poem, the speaker demonstrates some personality types associated with depression, such as guilt, lack of self-esteem, and shyness when he encounters another person, the watchman, and cannot make eye contact. In the speaker’s heart and soul, there seems to be something inside which needs to come out. The isolation grows, becoming more distant, cruel, and cold. The poem narrates that a cry has no effect, and the poet knows it will not connect with his life. The speaker does not have friends at the time and is probably hopeless and homeless. The speaker accepts that darkness has to be faced alone because it is part of the human condition.
Given Frost's historical background, he struggled through life’s darkest and hardest times. He was born in 1874 in California, San Francisco, and lost a father when he was only 11 years old. His father's death forced him to move with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He married his high school sweetheart, Elanor, in 1895 (Maven, 2017). They got their firstborn son, Elliot in 1896 and a daughter, Leslie, in April 1899. In 1899, Frost lost his mother and his first son. In 1902, they got another child, Carol and Irma, in 1903 and moved to New Hampshire in a small farm outside Derry (Maven, 2017). In Derry, they got another daughter, Marjorie, in 1905. Following Majorie's birth, they got Elinor Betina in 1907, who unfortunately passed away ( Su, 2016) . The children’s death hit Frost hard and travelled to England in 1912, trying to get away from his life in America. He settled in Buckinghamshire but later moved to Gloucestershire in 1914 after the outbreak of World War I. In 1915 Frost returned to Franconia. Tragedies kept on occurring in his life, where his sister, Jeanie developed mental health illness and was admitted in a mental health facility in 1920 and passed away 9 years later ( Su, 2016) . Marjorie, his daughter, died in 1934 in childbirth. In 1938, Elinor, his wife, succumbed to heart failure, and in 1940, Carol committed suicide at the age of 38 ( Su, 2016) . Later in 1947, his daughter Irma developed mental illness and was committed to a mental health facility.
The tragic incidents happening to Frost's family, as well as his mental state clearly explains the prevailing poem's undertone. The night, which depicts darkness in the poem, closely relates to Frost’s life burdens and his health issues. According to Su (2016) , Frost suffered from the impacts of mental health disorder all his years. His life was full of depressive episodes and felt unhinged by the darkness in its impulses. The successive deaths and misfortunes of his immediate family members were depressive. Frost’s anger and fears were somehow intense and probably took to his poetic work and distilled the wide range of terrifying nightmares into controlled verses.
The depressive theme, conveyed in terms of the night, relates to isolation, fear, depression, anxiety, and death in Front's life. The speaker integrated evocative street scenes and gentle observation and expressed his sense of being lost. The feelings of depression and isolation as he walks at night through the streets in the isolated city overwhelmed him. However, the narrator remains solitary as he looks at the moon and acknowledges that time means nothing to him due to the unending isolation despite his encounters with a watchman ( Frost, 1928) . The poem particularly discusses the narrator’s loss associated with the sense of isolation and the changes inherent in his life.
Conclusion
Frosts poem is his testimony to struggling through life’s darkest and hardest times. The poem equates a whole night to whole life. The narrator is acquainted with despair, having a family history of depression, losing his father at a tender age, and losing four of his three children, wife, and a sibling in his lifetime. He lost one child through suicide and two in their childhood, while the other developed a mental health disorder. Problems among his family members over the years induced depression and influenced him to find consolation in his poetic work. The tragic incidents happening to Frost’s family as well as his state of mind explains the prevailing undertone of the poem. The depressive theme, conveyed in terms of the night, relates to isolation, fear, depression, anxiety, and death in Front's life.
References
Direct, H. (2019, September 16). Causes of depression. Retrieved from https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/causes-of-depression
Frost, R. (1928). Acquainted with the night. Robert Frost: Collected poems, prose and plays , 234.
Malcolm, M., Frost, H., & Cowie, J. (2019). Loneliness and social isolation causal association with health-related lifestyle risk in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol. Systematic reviews , 8 (1), 48.
Maven, C. (2017, April 27). Robert Frost. Retrieved from https://www.biography.com/writer/robert-frost
Su, Y. (2016). Dark Energy in Robert Frost’s Poems . Theory and Practice in Language Studies , 6 (7), 1372-1376.
