21. Acquainted with the Night / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain―and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwillig to explain.

• on the beat : 순찰중인

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

• luminary : 발광체

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

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밤을 안다

나는 밤을 아는 사람이었다.

나는 빗속에 나갔다가―빗속에 돌아왔다.

나는 가장 먼 가로등보다 멀리 나갔다.

나는 가장 슬픈 도시의 도로를 내려다봤다.

​나는 순찰중인 야경꾼을 지나다가,

설명하기 싫어서, 눈을 내리깔았다.

내가 발소리 중단하고 가만히 서니

또 다른 거리에서 외마디 소리가

​여러 집 너머에서 아련하게 들렸지만,

나를 부르거나 잘 가라는 소리가 아니었다.

그리고 더욱 아득히 생소한 높이에서

하늘을 배경으로 반짝이는 시계가

시간은 옳지도 그르지도 않다고 선포했다.

나는 밤을 아는 사람이었다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 낮보다 밤이 좋을 때가 있다. 혼자 고독을 씹고 싶은 밤이 있다. 가로등이 없는 밤길이 좋을 때가 있다. 비를 맞으며 걷는 밤길이 좋을 때가 있다. 혼자 걷고 싶은 밤이 있다. 좁거나, 어둡거나, 긴 길이 아니라, 무지 슬픈 길을 걷고 싶은 밤이 있다. 야경꾼 따위는 못 본체, 무작정 걷고 싶은 밤이 있다.

그러나 이런 소망이 충족되면, 고독의 짐이 내 어깨를 짓누른다. 상황이 뒤바뀐다. 나는 사람이 그리워진다. 순찰중인 야경꾼을 지날 때, “설명하기 싫어서, 눈을 내리 깔았던” 까닭은 무엇인가? 고독의 길에 대한 죄의식이 무의식에 작용했기 때문이다. 배타적인 길을 가는 것은 죄악이다. 그만 혼자의 길을 거두고 돌아서야 한다. 불 켜진 창문을 향해 발걸음을 돌려야 한다.

그러기에 “또 다른 거리에서 외마디 소리가/ 여러 집 너머에서 아련하게 들렸을 때” 나는 발걸음을 멈추었다. 하지만 기대와 달리 나와는 무관한 소리였다. 나를 다시 불러들이는 사람은 아무도 없다. 내가 세상을 외면하면 세상도 나를 외면한다.

시내(市內)를 뒤돌아보는 나에게 멀리 보이는 시계탑은 생소하기만 하다. 시계탑 역시 나와는 무관하게 무정한 시간을 잴 뿐이다. 시간은 나의 길을 인도하지 않으며, 내가 옳은지 그른지 심판하지도 않는다.

나는 진정 밤을 아는가? 내가 보내는 시간은 밤인가, 낮인가? 내가 사는 시대는 밤인가, 낮인가? 밤을 견딜 수 있는 지혜는 무엇인가? 어둠에서 반짝이는 시계탑의 언어를 나는 이해하는가? 처음과 마지막에서 나는 “밤을 아는 사람이었다,”고 말했는데, 과연 나는 그 밤의 의미를 아는가? 내가 되뇌는 “밤”의 의미는 같은가? 아니면 그 의미에 진화가 있었는가?

-신재실 씀-

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“Acquainted with the Night” (1928) - Deirdre Fagan

This terza rima sonnet ( see FORM ) from West- Running Brook features a very different narrator from the country poet who is so familiar to us through such poems as “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Here the narrator is uncharacteristically urban. Some critics have drawn parallels to Dante’s Inferno, also written in tercets with interlocking rhymes, but the urban setting and images, speculated to be based on Ann Arbor, where Frost was living at the time of composition, seem more reminiscent of William Blake’s “London.” Frost writes, “I have outwalked the furthest city light / I have looked down the saddest city lane,” while Blake writes, “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The poem shares something in common with Frost’s other journey poems, such as “Into My Own.” He once again finds himself alone, only this time the setting is very different. The speaker, in a sort of soliloquy, reveals that more than once he has been “acquainted with the night.” The choice of acquainted is intriguing because it suggests a certain knowledge and familiarity without intimacy. An acquaintance is not a friend.

When the speaker says that he “has walked out in rain—and back in rain” he expresses an all-encompassing awareness of the night, darkness, and what they hold. He has “outwalked the furthest city light” and “looked down the saddest city lane,” suggesting that night is associated with unexplainable sadness, but it is yet unclear whether this sadness is the speaker’s or is witnessed by the speaker. The question is whether the sadness is inherent in the lane or is the perception of the speaker. When he walks past the “watchman on his beat” and drops his eyes, “unwilling to explain,” he reflects Frost’s often coy persona. He does not say that he cannot explain but rather that he is unwilling to. The speaker’s unwillingness suggests that the sadness comes from within, not from outside, himself. In the third stanza the speaker stands still, and the sound of feet stops. It is the sound of his own feet that is stopped, and when he hears from far away an “interrupted cry,” the poem grows more complicated. Is the cry from within or outside? The call is not meant to summon the speaker “back” or “say good-by,” writes Frost, but then, what is the cry for? Is it a cry of help? A cry of sadness, as alluded to in stanza two?

The poem’s trodding metrical feet become harder to understand between this fourth stanza and the ending couplet. The break indicated by the semicolon following “good-by” indicates a strange shift. The speaker begins to acquaint his readers with the night when he moves from the present to an “unearthly height” and a “luminary clock against the sky.” The clock is illuminated for the speaker, and its “unearthly height” suggests that it is Time, not time, with which the poem is concerned. That is, while he might be preoccupied with what seems to be earthly time, it is unearthly, transcendental time that vexes him.

When the proclamation comes from on high that “the time was neither wrong nor right,” Frost leaves his readers in the night he has created and begins again by returning to the poem’s title and first line: “I have been one acquainted with the night.” The figure of night suggests the night that shrouds one in darkness, sadness, and contemplation in the darkest of hours.

Night for Frost represents the innermost loneliness, a loneliness that keeps him isolated from those who cry out, but not for him, and from the watchman, who may or may not be aware of his presence. The speaker has scared himself with his “desert places.” Like Emily Dickinson in poems such as “I heard a Fly buzz— when I died—” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” he seems to have experienced a figurative death, as if he had been to the other side and returned to tell us about it. And now it seems that it is his own cries that are heard.

The repetition of “I have” and of “acquainted with the night” echo footfalls, suggesting that the reader accompanies the speaker into the night and must also determine whether the time is wrong or right. Jay Parini writes that Frost once said the clock “was in the tower of the old Washtenaw County Courthouse” in Ann Arbor, which would clearly indicate that there is a literal clock depicted in the poem (246). But the clock, like the night, is also symbolic. There may be an actual clock observed by the speaker, but what it represents goes beyond time as we know it.

Frost is often thought of as simply a poet of country matters, but he is much more than that. Here he places himself in a city setting. The poem flows smoothly but the speaker is ill at ease, and perhaps that is why it is a setting to which Frost does not often return. John Cunningham asserts that “One does well in Frost’s universe to be acquainted with the night, to know what it is like, but values and meaning are existential in the one who carries out his errands and keeps his promises. They are not transcendental” (270). See NATURE and NIGHT .

FURTHER READING
Brady, Patrick. “From New Criticism to Chaos and Emergence Theory: A Reinterpretation of a Poem by Robert Frost,” Synthesis: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 41–57.
Cunningham, John. “Human Presence in Frost’s Universe.” In The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen, 261–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Murray, Keat. “Robert Frost’s Portrait of a Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of ‘Acquainted with the Night,’ ” Midwest Quarterly 41, no. 4 (June 2000): 370–384.
Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 2003.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999. Timmerman, John H. Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002.

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Frank Lentricchia: On "Acquainted with the Night"

The sense of homelessness in "Acquainted With the Night" [Frost’s quintessential dramatic lyric of homelessness] becomes acute when the speaker is granted his wish and the full burden of loneliness descends upon him. When the interrupted cry breaks over the roofs from another street, he stops his feet, but it is a cry that concerns him not at all--no one calls him home. And when his glimpse at the clock tower (or perhaps it is the moon) suggests to him the indifference of time--it neither guides nor judges his journey, it just flows on inexorably--his homelessness begins to reveal its cosmological dimension. The cruel irony of his "acquaintance" with the night surfaces when the poem circles back to repeat its opening line which now begins to implicate the real state of the human condition with the state of darkness itself--they are reciprocally complementary--and the state of darkness begins to figure living without enclosure, with man on the outside and all the windows of the universe darkened.

"Acquainted With the Night" speaks to the confrontation with nothingness, to what Wallace Stevens called the "experience of annihilation." It was God who died, Stevens wrote, and we share in that death because we are left feeling "dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness." The furthest range of Frost's poem merges with Stevens's meditation on the feeling of metaphysical homelessness. With all chances gone for a harmonized relation of self and nature, the only enclosure possible is the one which the self can make and impose on an inhospitable universe. The image of self that we are left with in "Acquainted With the Night" is an image of frozen will, of feet stopped, with darkness all around and no constructive act forthcoming.

From Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Copyright © 1975 by Duke University Press.

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