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A Literary Explication Of 'Acquainted With The Night'

Decent Essays

A Literary Explication of “Acquainted with the Night” In the poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, the speaker sets a tone of loneliness, acceptance, and depression, all throughout the poem. In this poem the speaker surroundings are all distant, he has no family or friends. He walks “down the saddest city lane” (Frost, 1928, 4) feeling helpless but has never found anything to comfort his depression. Leaving the reader a connection and a better understanding of his life. In his poem, “Acquainted with the Night” Frost uses imagery, a metaphor, and irony to illustrate how depression and loneliness affects the speaker. In this poem the first literary element that Frost uses is imagery. The use of imagery gives his readers a deep …show more content…

The use of allegory is to help the reader understand the poet and why he wrote this poem. The speaker experiences many difficult challenges and also suffering through depression most of his life. When Frost began to explain that he has “been one acquainted with the night” (Frost, 1928, 1), which referred to loneliness and isolation he felt. The speaker states, “I walked out in rain-and back in rain” (Frost, 1928, 2). This is also where Frost uses the literacy element of allegory. He was always in and out of depression. “I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet” (Frost, 1928, 7) or someone attempted to communicate, but nobody was around to acknowledge him. Frost wanted the reader to feel the darkness and loneliness that he felt while walking down the street. The speaker felt that nobody was concerned “but not to call me back or say good-by” (Frost, 1928, 10) and nobody cared. “Proclaimed in the time was neither wrong nor right” (Frost, 1928, 13), meaning that Frost was giving up his fight against depression. What the readers may have not paid attention to is how the depression is affecting the speaker. This is the allegory of depression because you never know what an individual may or may not be going through. This can be very heartbreaking and hard to understand for families and

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