Week 12 - Night Walks

In our discussion today we talked about every night walking poem to some extent which was extremely interesting to me. Night walking reshapes perception by making spaces feel uncertain and 'uncanny', especially through the tension between exposure and enclosure. In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting,” darkness allows the narrator to lose her daytime identity and move anonymously through the city. This makes a paradox, she is physically exposed in public streets, but psychologically enclosed within her own shifting thoughts and stories. The night enables freedom, strangers and shop windows become narratives, and authority is destabilized. Her voice becomes fluid and exploratory.

In Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” which was my groups poem to dissect, darkness intensifies both exposure and enclosure in a more isolating way. The intensity builds through the poem, and there's a sense of submerged impropriety of Frost. Frost is exposed in empty, open streets, but feels emotionally sealed off from others. He's observing, with the moon as a clock above him. Unlike Woolf’s expansive imagination, Frost’s voice is controlled and repetitive especially within form. 


Darkness complicates perception and authority by placing the walker between exposure and enclosure. Woolf uses this tension to open up imaginative possibility, while Frost uses it to emphasize estrangement and emotional confinement in the night.


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