Today’s Poem: For Once, Then, Something

Robert Frost, the classical modern

A well with its well-curb (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s all too easy not to notice, especially if you aren’t a classicist yourself, the classicism of Robert Frost (1874–1963). As the mid-20th-century critic Gorham Munson notes (in an essay called, in fact, “The Classicism of Robert Frost,” published in 1964), it was Frost’s dubious fortune, as he rose to literary prominence in the 1910s and 1920s, to be miscategorized.

Yvor Winters, as Munson points out, mistakenly dismissed him as an “Emersonian Romantic,” of the house and lineage of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Modernism, meanwhile, sought to claim him as its own — never mind that Frost didn’t return the compliment. His homespun-sounding American diction and his pastoral aspect sprang from a deeper, more continuous, less revolutionary well of tradition. From that deep well, his own voice issued into the century he inhabited, as fresh as the spring-fed brooks that run through his poems, as clear and bracingly cold. 

Frost’s 1923 book New Hampshire marks the first distinct emergence of that voice. Gorham Munson records his own delight at discovering, on first reading the title poem, a “Horatian satire in a contemporary manner,” and in the whole book a disposition to “take a stand” against the “tendencies and revolts” of the “new poetry” of the period, with its various -isms.

New Hampshire includes several notable examples of what we now think of as Frost’s Greatest Hits, particularly “Fire and Ice” and, to sound the book’s final note, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” But while we’re thinking of wells, it’s another poem from New Hampshire, almost at the center of the book, that interests me today, as much for its easy command of a classical meter as for its probing of our capacity to see and know. 

Robert Frost as a young man (Wikimedia Commons)

Like “Stopping by Woods,” “For Once, Then, Something,” concerns itself with looking as an occupation. “Others taunt me,” the speaker says, “with having knelt at well-curbs” — in other words, having bothered to stop and look at what isn’t there. There’s something quixotic, as the taunters have intuited, in trying to see to the bottom of a well. The water, clear as it is, shows him not that hard bottom, but only his own reflection, as he appears to hang “godlike” from the sky above. Only once does he almost glimpse (he thinks) something real “beyond the picture.” But as soon as he almost glimpses whatever it is, a drop disturbs the well’s surface, to leave him guessing at what he might have seen, and frustrated by how close he has come to seeing it. He can’t even say for sure what the “it” might be. “Truth? A pebble of quartz?” The two possibilities seem to weigh the same in his mind, each an equal loss, as something real that has fled from his knowing. 

But what’s also remarkable about this poem is its utter at-homeness in its classical meter. The unrhymed lines are in hendecasyllabics, the Greek and Latin line of eleven syllables, traditionally consisting of a trochee or spondee, a choriamb, and two iambs. Here the meter scans as a trochee, a dactyl, and three more trochees. It’s absolutely consistent throughout, with no shifts, substitutions, or hiccups of any kind: a perfect surface, like the well water.

Yet the diction is so natural, conversational, and unforced, that in no place does this metrical achievement call attention to itself. Nothing seems done for the sake of the meter. No word strains to fit. It’s hard to think of any American contemporary of Frost’s who could have, or would have, accomplished this feat of both form and meaning. The poem itself, like the well, shines an image at us, through which we too glimpse, fleetingly, something that might be a “pebble of quartz,” or might be truth.  

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For Once, Then, Something

by Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs 
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing 
Deeper down in the well than where the water 
Gives me back in a shining surface picture 
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike 
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. 
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, 
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, 
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, 
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. 
Water came to rebuke the too clear water. 
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple 
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, 
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? 
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. 

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