Acquainted with the Night Isolation Quotes

Though "acquainted" involves knowing someone or something, it doesn't mean being friends, or being intimate with something. Also, the speaker has been "one" acquainted with the night – one is a lonely word in both sound and meaning. So, from the start, the poem has a distant and eerie tone. On top of it, the night is a pretty lonely thing to be acquainted with. It might be less lonely to not be acquainted with the night.

So now that we've seen the emotional isolation of being acquainted with the night, we see that the speaker is physically isolated. He's outwalked the furthest city light – so he's all alone, beyond the guidance of civilization.

Don't get too excited about seeing another human being, because it only makes the speaker more isolated. Policemen tend to scare us even when we're doing nothing wrong, and that's what the watchman does to our speaker in these lines. But when the speaker drops his eyes and walks on by, we're a little disappointed that he remains alone.