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 

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. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.