Acquainted with the Night

I really, really like this poem. I get a feeling of a sort of depressing, lonely atmosphere, but in a bazaar way that gives one pleasure. I just kept imagining Robert Frost walking through the city at night, after everything has stopped--bars closed, buses stopped, everything in standstill and abandoned in its place until morning. Playing in my head, I can just hear a somber Sinatra tune while Frost describes his journey through the still night. I was curious, though, about the second stanza of this poem, "I have looked down the saddest city lane./ I have passed by the watchman on his beat/ And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain./" My question here is, what is he keeping from the watchman? What is Frost implying with the last line of this stanza? The last line feels to me like it is gorging with a sense of guilt and shamefulness, specifically because he states how his eyes "drop." Also, is time a symbolic feature in this poem, as he looks at a clock-tower and goes into further depth of the time being right or wrong in the next stanza? Who is calling for him? Or is this all sequentially happening to define the fact that he is extremely alone and isolated? Maybe he wishes that someone would call for him and care what he had to say even though he looked, shamefully, at the ground, and whatever time that it might be, how much does it even matter? That's why it's never right or wrong when you're lost, alone, apathetic, sad, gloomy, depressed, etc. Unlike the last poem I responded to, though, I love the tone and feeling of this poem the way Robert Frost writes it.