Robert Frost, "Acquainted with the Night"

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" is not a traditional sonnet. Although it has the traditional fourteen lines and tightly rhymed stanzas associated with both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, Frost's rhyme scheme here is unusual: he uses the interlinking rhymes structured around successive tercets that is known as terza rima, whose greatest proponent was probably Dante in The Divine Comedy. But Frost takes the radical solitude of Dante, who bereft of Beatrice is then led by the ghost of Virgil into a sort of dream-vision of eternity, and offers no otherworldly way out. It is my hope to show that Frost pursues a strategy in "Acquainted with the Night" of using the mundane and realistic details suitable for a poem about observed life, and to make them feel less familiar -- through the formality of the verse -- until it seems that Frost has...
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