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Vallance Review 53, January 2006 Robert Frost (1874-1963) "I have been one acquainted with the night" "I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." [1] Robert Frost, 1935  Tom Thomson (1887-1917) Canada: The Group of Seven Two paintings of the Night 'Tis the Season After Advent, 'tis the season after Christmas and the season of Seasonal Affective Disorder, as so many of us know all too well from SAD personal experience. As I was mulling over our annually recurring season of darkness, wondering how best to delve the mysteries of winter's long nights, asking myself what sonnet might most suitably evince winter's pall, suddenly I hit on both sonneteer and sonnet alike. The poet's very name is wintry enough. I speak of none other than the great twentieth century American poet, Robert Frost. And the sonnet I have chosen for this review speaks volumes to the despondency we all too often must endure through the long dark months of winter. I refer of course to one of Frost's most acclaimed sonnets, "Acquainted with the Night".
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have looked down the saddest city lane [3]. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet But not to call me back or say good-by [5]; Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. Robert Frost (1874–1963) It is obvious to anyone familiar with traditional sonnet structure that this is no traditional sonnet, however you cut it. Critics are fond of pointing out that here we have a sonnet in English comprised entirely of terza rima in its first four stanzas, which are rounded out by a (so-called) rhyming couplet. With this stanza layout, so unusual for English sonnets, Robert Frost is clearly imitating the adapted Italianate template of Percy Bysshe Shelley's equally arcane, "Ode to the West Wind" (1820) [6], also comprised of a series of terza rima sonnets, which we will be reviewing in March 2006. But there is even more to Robert Frost's sonnet than its outer layer terza rima skin. Just by allowing myself to read his sonnet as a series of apparently conversational statements, one of the telling hallmarks of Robert Frost's earthy, pithy style, I fortuitously happened to stumble on the poem's interlaced substructure. If we closely follow the sentence structure of this unconventional sonnet, we are amazed to discover that Frost has allowed his sentences to expand from one clause [3] to two [4] to four [5], recycling back to his initial opening statement, "I have been acquainted with the night", a simple sentence of one clause [3] he quite deliberately and consciously refrains at the close of the sonnet. Even though the sonnet ends in what appears, at least superficially, to be a rhyming couplet, we could be fairly excused for dismissing the last stanza as a rhyming couplet in any traditional cast. Since Robert Frost chooses instead to refrain the opening verse of the sonnet in the last, he has in effect broken down or fractured this rhyming couplet's integrity. This he does with good reason, as we shall shortly discover. As far as I can tell, no poetry critic to date has noticed Frost's carefully crafted expanding-contracting sentence/paragraph substructure underlying the terza rima overlay. The moot question is, I wonder, what can this mean, if anything? And I do think it does definitely signify something; otherwise, why would Robert Frost have resorted to interlacing these two structures in a subtle rhythmic tapestry? One of these is the immediately recognizable traditional Italian terza rima which Frost, tongue-in-cheek, couches in equally traditional iambic pentameter ; the other is his use of expanding-contracting sentences in a conversational cast. The "answer", in so far as any rationalized answer may be forwarded, is perhaps to be adduced from the sonnet's vivid rhythmical overtones and undertones. Research in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of our own into conflicting metric theories of the sonnet genre's underlying rhythm(s) has shed considerably more light on sonnet metre, regular or irregular (if indeed the latter beast exists) than the entire corpus of widely accepted, pre-twentieth century traditional theory of iambic pentameter, which has until recently largely gone unchallenged. Considerably richer late twentieth century and early twenty-first century metric theories, however diverse and contradictory, have abounded, and are beginning to expose the glaring deficiencies of traditional iambic pentameter theory in its attempts, however elegant and persuasive, to explain away the sonnet's superficial rhythmic structure. I do not intend to waste our time and energy here expounding the theory (or if you like theories) of iambic pentameter. For centuries now, plenty of ink has been washed away on the subject. If you are unfamiliar with the basic precepts of iambic pentameter, you may wish to consult any one of hundreds of sites devoted to the topic on the Internet [7]. While iambic pentameter adequately accounts for the basic rhythmic structure of most sonnets (though scarcely all, by any means), it does not address certain fundamental and frequently contradictory or paradoxical variances which crop up with astounding frequency in thousands upon thousands of famous sonnets. Amongst these variants in rhythm, we may count: 1. The embarrassingly frequent use of initial trochees, allowing the more adept sonneteer to "kick off" his sonnet, or even several stanzas or verses, with a reverse stress (masculine feminine instead of the usual feminine masculine iambic stress). This ploy is historically so common in sonnets that it scarcely needs mention. "Acquainted with the night" begins with a very strongly accentuated trochee, "I have...". The stress on the first word "I" is heavily marked. The feminine stress on "have" (an auxiliary verb at any rate) is so weak as to almost vanish between the two strong stresses of "I" and "been one", which kicks off the first iamb of the sonnet with a rather strongly "promoted" feminine stress "been", followed by the masculine stress, "one". To read this sonnet's initial foot any way other than as a trochee is to do violence to it and to the sonnet as a whole. Not to belabour the point but to draw your attention closer to it, notice that Frost resorts to this emphatic trochee no less than six times (can you believe it?) in this one sonnet. Such a heavy reliance on an initial trochee throughout a sonnet is extremely rare in sonnet literature, but Frost deploys it to great effect here. 2. Many classical and modern sonneteers also often resort to dactyls (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed) or anapests (two unstressed syllables plus one stressed syllable, the mirror of the dactyl) or other metric twists to vary their iambic pentameter lines for the sake of rhythmic and tonal colour. This is a good thing, since consistently regular iambic pentameter is sooner or later bound to degenerate into a brittle foxtrot or worse yet, numbing dogtrot rhythmic beat, leaving the listener with the distinct impression he or she is listening to a poem which sounds uncannily like a kettle drum when recited. Such an experience can disturb the listener's sense of aural propriety or, in a worst case scenario, even grate on the ears and one's sense of rhythmic sensibility. For a really striking example of the use of two dactyls in succession, refer to Vallance Review 36, August 2005, in which I review Robert Silliman Hillyer's fast paced, breathtakingly beautiful sonnet, "Quickly and pleasantly the seasons blow..." (See those two initial running dactyls? See also note [5] in that review.) 3. Some sonneteers, such as Walter de la Mare in his deliciously haunting moonlight sonata sonnet, "Silver", which I myself reviewed in Vallance Review 12, Poetry Life & Times, August 2002, vary their rhythms all over the map, and even go so far as to toss the strict iambic pentameter five foot, 10 syllable line structure right out the window. Several of the verses in this sonnet are either catalectic, i.e. "missing" a syllable or 9 syllables in length or acatalectic, with one extra syllable or 11 syllables in length [9]. Was Walter de la Mare aware he was doing this? Well, of course. What's more, some of his verses are tetrameter (8 syllables in length) and some catalectic tetrameter (7 syllables)! Confusing? Not to de la Mare, and certainly not to me. "If the shoe fits, wear it." Walter de la Mare did, and he was more than comfortable with the rather esoteric rhythms of his gorgeous sonnet. 4. Then too, we find ourselves confronted with the striking contrapuntal tensions of Gerard Manley Hopkin's highly unorthodox "sprung" or "tripped" rhythms which do not conform to the notion of iambic pentameter in the least. Granted, his sonnets were a highly controversial experiment in approaching the fundamental harmonics of rhythm in sonnets composed in English. He conceived of the innate rhythmic structure of the English language in terms quite alien to the principles obsessively driving most sonneteers, who are unabashed iambic pentameter enthusiasts. But the fact that his theory worked so amazingly well for him attests to the staying power and sheer genius of his own peculiar vision. Few sonneteers have since been able to replicate his amazing versatility with sprung rhythm. This does not mean the approach is invalid, merely extremely difficult to pull off with panache. Leave it to Gerard Manley Hopkins, genial sonneteer as he was, to have nourished sprung metre as stunningly as he did. 5. But there is more to metric variation in the rhythmic structure of the sonnet than any of the above variants can conceivably account for... far more. From the perspective of rhythm (or metrics, if you like), the subtlest and most persuasive of sonnets invariably seem to evince a certain contrapuntal tension. Said tension is rarely as dramatic or as explicit, "in your face" as we would say nowadays, as we find over and over again in the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tension is implicit; but it is surely there. This sort of contrapuntal tension is in evidence at three levels at least in Robert Frost's "I have been acquainted with the night." These are: 1. The sonnet is highly conversational in tone. Conversational English is quasi-iambic by nature, but I emphasize it is never purely iambic. Otherwise we would all have been bored to death long ago by an unending succession of dogtrot sonnets and worse still, droves of iambic conversation, if you can imagine such a horror. 2. This sonnet's alternate expanding-contracting sentence structure lends even more weight to its clearly conversational tone, and introduces marked tension to the overlayed iambic pentameter rhythms. 3. In any truly masterful sonnet composed in superficial "iambic pentameter", by means of subtle rhythmic variations such as I have illustrated above, the stress patterns tend to assume primary and secondary stresses, where the poet is left no choice but to promote certain stresses and demote others. What are promotion and demotion? The terms deserve a full elucidation and here it is, according to its major theoretical proponent, Derek Attridge, whom one of his critics cites as follows: Normally, a beat is realized by a stressed syllable, and an offbeat by an unstressed syllable, verse lines being made from patterns of beats and offbeats. As Attridge emphasizes, it "is extremely important to remember at all times that STRESSES are different from BEATS; they often coincide, but they are not the same thing". This is to say that in certain situations beats may be realized by unstressed syllables, a phenomenon Attridge calls "promotion", and offbeats by stressed syllables, "demotion". The value of this simple system is that it allows a degree of accuracy in the description of rhythmic effects that has not before been possible without it being overwhelmed by an unmanageable and spuriously precise attention to distracting minutiae. Building on this basis, Attridge introduces discussions of the types of verse built around a hierarchy of primary and secondary beats... [8] While I, as a sonneteer myself, cannot in good conscience entirely approve of Derek Attridge's theory of rhythm and metre without a certain partial recourse to good old iambic pentameter, my point is simply this: Robert Frost's entirely remarkable sonnet can be recited aloud in two entirely divergent ways, by interlacing two differing underlying or implicit rhythmic cadences. One of these is to recite the sonnet according to the rhythmic dictates of traditional iambic pentameter alone. That is the way most people, including less rhythmically sensitive poets, would, I think, choose to read this sonnet. But in so doing, such recitations are bound to miss some of the more subtle undertones of this remarkable English sonnet. However, I believe more rhythmically sensitive readers, and particularly contemporary poets and sonneteers with a finer tuned inner ear, are more than likely to recite this tonally challenging sonnet in such a manner that they lend a more easy-flowing conversational undertone to the sonnet's overlayed iambic pentameter. To press my point even further, I would like to forward the thesis that anyone reciting classical sonnets, and even those composed in apparently strict iambic pentameter should strive to recite them aloud with a human sensitivity to the sonneteer's penchant for subtly varying iambic pentameter with occasional trochees, dactyls, anapests and other rhythmic quirks and quarks. Traditionally strict theories of iambic pentameter inadequately account for such deliberately engineered "discrepancies" in rhythm, which tellingly reveal the penchant the more gifted poets have for frolicking with rhythm, in other words, to play with their readers' or listeners' sensitivities to subtle variants in rhythm and tonality . In short, there is no such thing as pure iambic pentameter. If there were, it would be dogtrot doggerel, and mind-numbingly boring. All great sonnets, like their musical counterparts, great classical compositions by the likes of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, should truly sing. Great sonnets invariably resonate at some deeper lever of the human psyche. Sonnets which do not attain to this high standard of tonal and musical grace are, simply put, not great sonnets. Robert Frost's "Acquainted With the Night", for all the apparent regularity and simplicity of its superficially iambic pentameter rhythms, is such a subtly crafted poem rhythmically that it is in fact a masterpiece of English, let alone, American poetry. As Frost himself so aptly encapsulated it, "The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader of poetry." [14] If we sufficiently allow for the application of the three factors I have enumerated above, viz; conversational tone, metric substitution (e.g. initial trochees for iambs) and above all, contrapuntal tension achieved through stress promotion and demotion [8,bis], I believe that we can allow ourselves to hear for ourselves a more natural sounding, freer flowing and more pleasing cadence and tonality when we recite a sonnet such as Robert Frost's intimate, personally appealing and sympathetic sonnet, "Acquainted With the Night". To recite it aloud any other way would be to do it a disservice at the very least, to do it injustice at least, and to do it violence at the very worst. The same could be said of any of the scores of sonnet masterpieces we have reviewed to date in The Vallance Reviews. Read them as strict iambic pentameter and you read them as though you were a robotic dolt titling at Quixotic windmills. Read each finely tuned sonnet in a natural voice, in natural quasi-conversational rhythms, allowing the sentences to flow as they will of their own accord, and you will almost surely recite it in such a way as to accentuate and highlight the innate tonal beauty its author intended to invest it with according to the dictates of his or her own unique sense of rhythm. No two poets, no two sonneteers, are ever invested with the same sense of rhythm, any more than any two great music composers. Robert Frost is his own poet and master of the cadenced music of his own psyche's inner prose rhythms. The music you hear in his sonnets is quite unlike that you will hear in those of any other great sonneteer, simply because he is Robert Frost. Reciting his deeply haunting, "I have been acquainted with the night." should convince anyone with a real sensitivity to Frost's own inimitable rhythms of this. First and foremost, allow me to stress that the exploratory commentary I have expounded above on Robert Frost's deployment of metre in this sonnet is only a first baby step in the analysis of rhythm and metrics that is bound to surf the literature of poetry criticism in the course of this century. If anything, we have so far barely scratched the surface of the rich potentialities innate to poetic rhythms in English poetry. No single theory, no one theorist nor any one rhythmically gifted poet can claim to have cornered the market, as it were, on the intricacies and subtleties patterned into rhythm in formal poetry, especially in a genre as traditionally confined as the sonnet has been, subjected as it has been historically to the rather narrow dictates of the iambic pentameter template. Several diverging, even conflicting, theories "explaining" poetic metre abound. All of them bear some grain of truth. But we have a lot to learn. And that is the beauty of the beast. As a practicing sonneteer myself, I have little doubt that more and more refined studies of poetic metre throughout this century will eventually shed further light on the deficiencies of the metric theories we are presently saddled with. Where such research will lead is anyone's guess. But the long-term outcome is sure to make us the wiser and richer for our dauntless efforts. One thing is certain, however: critics of metric theory should, I believe, always bear in mind that it is the genius of each individual poet which determines the essential tonal qualities of his or her own creations, be they sonnets or other genres of poetry. With all this in mind, I invite contemporary and future sonnet critics and sonneteers alike to continue contributing to the ongoing discussion of the potentialities of rhythm and metre in the sonnet, with a view to enriching and refining our present purblind knowledge of the art. How Robert Frost's Background Influences his Style 
What "Acquainted with the Night" Tells us about Robert Frost
Many Americans and quite a lot of non-Americans alike familiar with Robert Frost's poetry are also well acquainted with the many trials and tribulations of his life, which loom large in his poems. Robert Frost is one of America's quintessential defining poets, along with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Theirs is the poetry of America, whether transcendental, down-to-earth, exulting or poetry tailored for "the common man on the street". America's democratic idealism is shot through the poetry of America's greatest bards. But so too are America's darkest moments, her tragedies and failures, such as the Civil War in Whitman's poetry and, of course, the blight of racism which mars the nation's psyche even to this very day. Robert Frost, as honourable an American as any poet could ever have been, could not escape the darker side of his nation's oversoul, any more than he could avoid embracing her stellar greatness. If we attend to the contours of his life's many struggles, we readily realize how much these have in fact influenced and coloured so much of his best poetry, including in particular this masterful sonnet, "Acquainted with the Night". Allow me to reference just a few of the harsh, sometimes tragic events, which underscored his long life of 89 years. In his childhood, Robert Frost was subjected to the horrors of harsh discipline from the hands of his violent, alcoholic father, William Frost, who died of tuberculosis and alcoholism in 1885. Consequently, as a child, Robert Frost was singularly rebellious, hardly surprising under the circumstances. William's alcoholism also severely strained his marriage. To make matters worse, Frost's mother, whom he loved dearly, died of cancer in 1900 [13]. As a young man, Frost vacillated amongst several occupations, first being a school teacher, then a mill worker and a newspaper reporter in quick succession in the 1890s [12]. Robert Frost and his wife, Elinor, had to move to England in the early years of the twentieth century for him to finally see his poetry publicly acclaimed and published in any volume and recognized for its innate strength [13]. By aligning himself with such popular Georgian poets as Rupert Brooke and Ezra Pound, he was able to get his first published volume of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913), accepted by a London Publisher [13]. After that, things looked up, way up. Upon his return to America in 1915, out of the blue, American publishers began scooping up his poetry collections in droves [10,13]. He was appointed English professor at Amherst College, New Hampshire in 1916, a post he held unremittingly until 1938 [10]. However, his life during these years and thereafter was no picnic. Although at a personal level he quite disliked Ezra Pound, who was, like his own father, an alcoholic and emotionally unstable, Robert Frost was a man of high principles. So when Ezra Pound was committed to a psychiatric facility in Washington, D.C., Frost stood firmly by him both emotionally and materially to have him released [13]. Things did not much improve in Frost's later years. Frequently subject to bouts of depression, probably induced by recurrent tragedies in his own family and inner circle plaguing his life "more painful than most, Frost struggled heroically with his inner and outer demons,..." [13] And no wonder! "Behind the largely unruffled public facade was a personal life of great distress and sorrow." (Ibid.) Like Ezra Pound, Frost's own sister was committed to a mental hospital. Then his own daughter, Marjorie, died in 1934, shortly after delivering her first child. A difficult marriage occasioned the early death of his wife, Elinor, of heart disease in 1938. To top it all off, Frost's son, Carol, despite his father's devoted and loving struggles to rescue him, committed suicide in 1940 [13]. While none of these traumatic experiences — and they seemed to come in droves -- ever found direct expression in any of Frost's poems, since he was a reserved and rather shy man, nevertheless, these tragic events quite clearly underscore and inform the tone and thematic contours of so many of his greatest poems. "Acquainted with the Night" is no exception to this. A sense of despondency and gloom pervades this otherwise courageous, even heroic, sonnet. Frost's indomitable will and grand faith in the face of life's relentless round of tragic events shines through in this sonnet as it so does so often in his other great poems. This is one of the salient features of Frost's poetry which makes it the magnum opus it most assuredly is. Notwithstanding the subtly autobiographical imprint on his poems, "Acquainted with the Night" stands as a masterpiece of psychologically gripping sonnet literature in its own right. Anyone with the slightest empathy with the sufferings of his or her fellow human beings would be hard pressed not to recognize a life of great suffering and steadfast courage shining through this puissant sonnet, whether or not the reader were acquainted with Robert Frost's biographical background. His autobiography is incidental to his poetry and to this sonnet. His greatest poems and sonnets proudly stand on their own, in their own right. This is one of the keys to this sonnet's greatness. It stands head and shoulders above so many other lesser sonnets of similar ilk in twentieth century American literature, with the possible exception of the equally brilliant sonnets of his fellow compatriot Edna Saint-Vincent Millay, simply because it is invested with the poet's uniquely compelling creative power. While it would be patently preposterous to directly associate this sonnet's structure with that of the rondeau [15] or the villanelle [16], I would like to highlight the remarkable tour de force its refrain represents in the very last verse. Frost makes us acutely aware that he means business when he refrains the first verse in the last. In a sonnet by any lesser poet, such a ploy would strike us as contrived and flat. But in this masterpiece of sonnet literature, wherein Frost deliberately and consciously fractures the rhyming couplet, turning the entire sonnet in on itself by repeating the first line in the last, our poet achieves something just short of the miraculous. He is inviting us to read, or better still, recite the sonnet over and over and over, like a song in refrain. Isn't that what the rondeau or the villanelle set out to do? Here then we have a sonnet whose musical and psychological effects are paramount to a kind of soulful incantation. Frost's skill is great indeed. He has achieved the same results as one might from a rondeau or a villanelle, yet without having to resort to multiple verse repetitions -- one of the several reasons I myself am not particlarily fond of rondeaux and villanelles, unless they are of the very highest calibre. In this wholly remarkable sonnet, he refrains a single verse only. And that is quite a tour de force. The sonnet's sole verse refrain is further enhanced by the sixfold auxiliary verbal refrain in the emphatic trochee "I have". As the old saying goes, the finest poems are not those you read once and once only, but those you just keep wanting to return to, because they draw you in and mesmerize you in spite of yourself. "Acquainted with the Night" is just such a sonnet. Pierre de Ronsard, "Je vous envoie un bouquet..." Coming next month, February 2006, Vallance Review 54, our annual "Valentine's Day" review, critiques Pierre de Ronsard's exquisitely crafted Petrarchan sonnet, « Je vous envoie un bouquet... ». This charming sonnet will be the first ever critiqued in a bilingual English-French Vallance Review on a French sonnet, so that our French readers in Canada, France and the other francophone countries of the world may comfortably read the review along with our regular anglophone readers. Keep posted. © by Richard Vallance, Dec. 22 2005 with the editorial assistance of Bradley Alexander Bucsis and Eric Linden (Canada) and Carmen Ruggero (USA)
References & Notes [1] Quote Garden: Robert Frost
Richard Vallance is the author of: Canadian Federation of Poets: Poetry Lessons: Lesson & Exercise - Week 18 SONNETS in The Canadian Federation of Poets weekly Poetry Progress Lessons & Exercises series
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