Tenuous connections: Isaiah, Van Gogh and Robert Frost

  Sunday last I was preaching on Isaiah 9. The great poet prophet scatters lights around his writing like a Van Gogh starry night. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…." But what makes the brilliance of Isaianic light and hope so startling is the setting, against the darkness, gloom and menace of the night. Van Gogh's masterpiece works because of the same contrast, golden swirling balls of light against cobalt blue framed in black.

The picture Isaiah paints reminds me of that painting, and of one of my favourite poems, Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night".

I read it at the start of the sermon, and sensed once again the wistful resignation, the knowing that can only come from loneliness, uncertainty and the chronic longing for home. As a poem of exile, inner, urban, spiritual or emotional, it describes the half remembered pain, the yearning for solace, the listening of the heart for the sounds of other human presence, that we each might find we also were 'unwilling to explain'.

Anyway, it's too good a poem to not cite, and too important in my own stellar constellation of best loved poems to not find a place on this blog.

Acquainted
with the Night

by: Robert Frost  

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,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.