For Once, Then, Something

by Robert Frost

an explication

This poem is an excellent example of how Frost encounters an object or event and moves through metaphor to an interesting idea. In this case, Frost has found a well. He claims that others, perhaps his friends, have taunted him for the strange way he looks down wells. Most of his friends lean over, peer straight down and try to see as far as possible into the water, hopefully, to the bottom and whatever may lie there. Frost orients himself differently. He kneels at the curb of the well and tries to look at the water aslant so that the sunlight will allow him to see himself reflected in the pool of water: “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.” The image appeared godlike to him as, reflected behind his face, are ferns and cloud puffs, a face appearing to look down from the sky, god-like. This is an allusion to Narcissus from Greek mythology who adored his own image in pools, ponds and wells. However, Frost seems more fascinated by how the water and sun create the image than seduced into falling in love with his own image.

The title signals the singularity of this particular experience, “For Once, Then, Something.” This one time, when he looked for his image in the water, he thought he saw something behind it: “I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture/through the picture, a something white, uncertain,/Something more of the depths.” And then he lost it. A drop of water fell from a fern and sent ripples through the water and this white object, which he conjectures was truth or, perhaps, a mere pebble of quartz, was lost to view.

For Frost, this is a metaphor for life in this world. Most of existence is beyond our understanding, but on occasion, and for only a brief moment, a truth is revealed. What is seen or learned is sometimes called an insight and the moment itself is known as an epiphany. The white piece of quartz, which blurred and disappeared from view almost immediately because of the rippling water, is used by Frost to metaphorically represent an insight or truth about life. The singularity and brevity of the moment becomes a metaphor for all such moments of understanding in life. The title of the poem, then, communicates a kind of exasperation with these moments: “For Once, Then, Something,” which roughly becomes “Then, finally, I saw something and then it was gone.”

Frost saw this event as emblematic of life in general. The event was finding a well and peering into the water in order to see his reflection. The something white, perhaps a piece of quartz, becomes a metaphor for truth, or the moment of insight in life. The idea that grows seamlessly from the metaphor is that these moments are rare and frustrating. For a brief moment we think we understand one of the fundamental truths of life and then it is gone and we devolve back into our more normal state of confusion.

Uncharacteristic of Frost, the poem does not rhyme. Frost wrote very few short, lyric poems without rhyme. Frost also writes almost exclusively in 10 syllable lines, roughly 5 iambic feet. Here, however, he writes 11 syllable lines and ends each line with a falling foot, that is, the extra syllable is at the end of the line and is an unaccented one. Assuming that a poet as careful as Frost always writes with a purpose and form is often in the service of meaning, are their any implications to his unusual employment of rhyme and meter? If his poem is really about staring down a well to understand, if briefly, something true about life, might his falling foot at the end of each line support that? If the normal state of affairs is confusion and only briefly do we feel anything makes sense, if the universe is more often than not without rhyme or reason, would it serve the poet’s purpose to remove rhyme from this poem?