Today’s Poem of the Day continues the Sun’s week-long commemoration of the 1923 publication of Robert Frost’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning “New Hampshire.” The 24th poem in the collection, “For Once, Then, Something,” occurs just past the book’s mid-point, on the heels of the famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” featured as yesterday’s Poem of the Day. Like the speaker in “Stopping by Woods,” this poem’s speaker, too, is a compulsive stopper-and-looker. “Others taunt me,” he says, with having bothered to look at what isn’t there. He makes a habit of studying not the solid bottom of the well, but only his own reflection, as he appears to hang “godlike” from the sky above. Only once does he almost see (he thinks) something real “beyond the picture,” although as soon as he glimpses whatever it is, a drop disturbs the well’s surface, to leave him guessing at what he might have seen. The poem’s unrhymed hendecasyllabic lines, meanwhile, form their own perfect surface. The speaker’s fluid, unstrained diction makes it easy not to notice the absolute precision of the meter: trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, trochee. The poem itself, then, like the well, shines an image at us, through which we too might glimpse, fleetingly, something like (though it might not be) truth.  

For Once, Then, Something 
by Robert Frost