[Eric Webb]

Specifically, how Frost plays with the sonnet in
Acquainted with the Night

On advice rec'd in the general discussion forum,
I've been reading and looking for modern metrical
poetry. Reading and reading and close reading,
Shakespeare, Frost, e.e. cummings, the various
anthologies I've collected, etc. So, I've come
across Acquainted with the Night and
the poem sparked my curiosity. I didn't link
at first the relation to sonnet form, but once
I started looking deeper, I noticed the 14 lines,
the closing couplet, and the rhyme scheme...
I'm not even sure, besides those clues, that the
poem is a sonnet... When I tried scanning
the lines, most were tetrameter, with the only
strict iambic pentameter in l.13. I could just
be too new at this to really see the 5 feet per
line and just bungled up my scan of it. I'm using
Gwyn's Pocket Anthology, and didn't notice in a
quick skim any other poems like this one.
I really admire the poem, and I want to understand
what is going with it.
So My Questions:
Is Frost's poem, in fact, a take on the sonnet?
If not, what kind of form is this?
Am I correct in scanning most of the lines as tetrameter?
What other questions do I need to be asking?

Learned opinions/facts most welcome...
Thanks,
Eric

[Diana B]

Hi Eric

My googles bring me to believe that:

1. It's a Terza Rima (or, in Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" - a terza rima sonnet)
2. It reads as iambic pentameter, to me.

Just my take.

Di

PS: Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is in terza rima. Here's an example of the beginning section:

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!



[This message has been edited by Diana B (edited March 24, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Hi--"Acquainted with the Night" is indeed a sonnet, and also in terza rima. There are no hard-and-fast rules about how a sonnet should rhyme--see "Ozymandias" for a nonce rime scheme. (And there are some sonnets that do not rime.) And yes, it is all in iambic pentameter, although the plethora of monosyllables may make the "beats" of the lines rather flexible and faint. Remember, for instance, that prepositions (with, out, down, etc.) might look like unimportant little words, but, contrary to some popular belief about scansion, they are important and very often take a stress:


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, unwilling to explain.

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-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.


Worrisomely, I notice that in several places on the internet, line 12 now reads as an apostrophe--"O" luminary clock instead of "One" luminary clock. We have reached a new, electronic era of textual transmission and its errors.

Anyway, marvellous poem.

cheers,

Alicia

[A. E. Stallings]

By the way, do we know of examples of other terza-rima sonnets?

[Gregory Dowling]

Here's one by the British poet Peter Dale, from his sonnet sequence "One Another":

Shadow

Shadow of a leaf on a butterfly's wing,
solid as a beetle's wing-case, fine veneer.
I wait to hear it click down like a spring

the instant that the tortoise-shell flits clear.
I'm learning to be patient, love. You freeze.
My hold is less than light on you, that sheer

absorption, as you tense for flight or breeze.
Glacially, you edge forward now. I know
enough of you to see you mean to ease

your shadow over the wing and hold it so.
That daft stray lock of yours will almost reach.
You cannot make it stay. It's touch and go.

The shadow leaf snaps down in me like a screech.
I catch you off balance and without speech.

[Peter Chipman]

Hi, Eric.

If you're having trouble scanning this poem--which is actually more metrically regular than most of Shakespeare's sonnets--bear in mind the following rules:

1. In order to take a metrical beat, a syllable does not have to be one that would ordinarily take an especially strong speech stress--it can still count as a beat if it isn't contiguous with a more strongly-stressed syllable. Thus, as Alicia notes, a preoposition like "WITH" in line 1 (and 14) can take a metrical beat because it's sandwiched between the weaker syllables "-ted" and "the." Same goes for "...WATCHman ON his BEAT" and "unWILling TO exPLAIN" and "HOUses FROM aNOther." In each of these cases the preposition sounds just strongly enough to constitute one of the line's five beats.

2. Likewise, in polysyllabic words there will frequently be syllables other than the main stressed syllable that easily take a certain amount of extra stress. If you look up the pronunciation guide for a word like this in a dictionary, it will typically use a forward-slanting accent mark (/) for the primary stress and backward-slanting accents for any secondary stresses (\). Those secondarily-stressed syllables can take the metrical beat or not, depending on context. In "Acquainted," a word like "interrupted" can count for two metrical beats--one for its primary speech stress ("-RUP-"), and one for the secondary stress on "IN-." "LUmiNAry" works pretty much the same way, except there the primary speech stress is on the first syllable and the secondary stress is on the third syllable.

3. While verbs are usually more likely to take a metrical beat than prepositions, this is not the case when the verb and preposition are paired together tightly to make a verb phrase. To give a fairly bad example: one LOOKS up the chimney for Santa Claus (here the proposition is more connected to "the chimney" than to the verb "looks," so it isn't a verb phrase), but one looks UP the spelling of a difficult word (here the "up" is obviously more closely linked to the verb "looks" than to the noun, so it constitutes a verb phrase. An egg may BREAK in its carton, but a hiker breaks IN a new pair of boots. Frost's speaker has "walked OUT" in rain, rather than WALKED "out in RAIN."

4. It has always been acceptable for a line of iambic pentameter to begin with a trochee instead of an iamb. All of the lines beginning "I have" should probably be read as starting with a trochee.

This is probably more than you wanted to know. Sorry.

yours,
Peter

[Hugh Clary]

Frost liked to play with the sonnet form, usually just varying the rhymes and meter. For example,


Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last *Put out the Light* was spoken.


The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.


Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.


The Birthplace

Here further up the mountain slope
Than there was every any hope,
My father built, enclosed a spring,
Strung chains of wall round everything,
Subdued the growth of earth to grass,
And brought our various lives to pass.
A dozen girls and boys we were.
The mountain seemed to like the stir,
And made of us a little while--
With always something in her smile.
Today she wouldn't know our name.
(No girl's, of course, has stayed the same.)
The mountain pushed us off her knees.
And now her lap is full of trees.

[Eric Webb]

All,
Earnest thanks for all the help and suggestions.
I need to study...

The more I read through (aloud) the poem, the more
I hear my mistakes in scanning. The form intrigues
me, particularly how Frost brought the 'a' rhyme
back in at the end, and repeated the first line.
Makes for a strong ending, to me, but obviously
there are few subjects to be dealt with this way.

So, more reading!

Thanks again
Eric

[Gregory Dowling]

Here's another terza rima sonnet, this time by Elizabeth Jennings. It seems appropriate for the time of year too (give or take a few days).


In April

This is a time for beginning and forgiving,
Lent and April - how their honour shines,
How they ask a change in all our living

Now where the earth shows such propitious signs,
The bursting blossom, and the birds who sing
As if no winter happened. There are lines

Upon my face, the show of lingering
Sadness and grief; I stand aside from all
This ceremonious joy. The birds who wing

In widening circles must like all things fall
But for this moment seem eternal. I
Have no words, no sign, and no fit call.

Disillusion is a way to die.
I wear the dark of it now like a shawl.

[A. E. Stallings]

This has been a very interesting thread. I am a fan of Elizabeth Jennings, but had forgotten this sonnet. I was going to ask in an off-handed kind of way if Frost's is the first terza rima sonnet we could think of, when I just realized looking though this thread and Diana's post that, duh, Ode to the West Wind is not just terza rima, but in fact, composed of terza rima sonnets. So perhaps we ought to think of the Frost as being in a West-Wind stanza!