Aquainted with the Night

Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night’ is not a traditional sonnet in form or theme in comparison to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “Acquainted with the Night” is designated as a sonnet because it is a fourteen-line poem. The only traditional asset of this sonnet is that it is written in iambic pentameter, with accents falling on every second syllable, in lines ten syllables long as in: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Every other aspect of “Acquainted with the Night” is untraditional. Frost’s sonnet differs from the traditional Shakespearean sonnet in rhyme scheme, formation of ideas, tone, and theme.

In “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” the form is divided into three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyme scheme of the three quatrains is ABAB, and the last two lines of the couplet have the rhyme scheme CC. The last quatrain and the couplet of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” demonstrates this in lines 9-14:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

Came over houses from another street.

Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” is written in Terza rima, which means the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the next stanza, shown in lines7-12:

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