Figurative Language In Robert Frost's Acquainted With The Night

The sonnet “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost contains fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter with five stanzas. The poem depicts a first person view of someone battling depression. The speaker warns the reader he is “acquainted with the” (Frost 1) the vicious cycle of the disease. Through his illustration of walking alone at night, the reader see that the sickness is a lonely and dark struggle. As he continues his isolated walk, he passes a “watchman” (Frost 5) or society where he avoids eye contact. He feels that society is judging him because of his mental illness. As he travels deeper into depression, he hears muffled voices of people, “but [it is] not to call [him] back” (Frost 10). He physical can hear his family, but he cannot mental recognize that they are there to help. As he engulfed by the darkness, he begins to contemplate suicide, but there is a glimpse of hope with the

Figurative language is a great tool in poetry for the author to express meaning that surpasses the literal context. The poem contains the figurative language of personification, which is the use of human characterizes to an inanimate object. An example is when Frost describes the speaker looking “down the saddest city lane” (4). Clearly, a lane cannot express emotions such as sadness, but this figurative language helps to paint a gloomy picture to convey the message to the reader. Frost uses multiple types of figure language throughout the poem to add more description to the image. Additionally, Frost manages to incorporate sound devices to strengthen the message by producing a sad tune. One of the many sound device Frost uses is alliteration, which is replication of consonant sound at the beginning of words. For example, the speaker states he “stood still and stopped the sound” (Frost 7) which adds emphasize to the line by stressing the “s”