For Once, Then, Something

by Robert Frost

Directions: One critical view of Frost the poet is: Frost’s poems often move from an event or an object through a metaphor to an idea in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. Within this pattern, Frost usually describes a complete event rather than a single vision. The heart of the process is the image or metaphor. Frost himself saw the metaphor as the beginning of the process.

Examine the following poem. Is it an example of Frost locating an object or an event and then moving through a metaphor to an idea in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. Analyze and explain in detail. Your analysis should display thinking on paper.

For Once, Then, Something

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

My 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.