Yesterday at the FT office, this Robert Frost poem came up in conversation. Technically masterful, with a regular but unusual metrical pattern, it is unrhymed and verbally simple yet laced together with a wistful lyricism that echoes between image and line. Joseph Bottum reads it as an uncommon example of English hexameter—and, more uncommon, hexameter that works—with an absent stress in each final foot, as allowed by classical prosody. (I’m inclined to scan it as trochaic pentameter, with dactylic substitutions.)
The trochaic rhythm of stress-unstress creates a strange feeling—almost as though the speaker is leaning over the edge of the well with his very words, peering into the rippling water that always eludes clear sight and resolution: Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Moments of truth, I call these times, where we glimpse the deeper meaning for a moment, and then it’s beyond grasp. But the memory of that “once, then, something” stays . . . along with the knowledge of how little we know.
For Once, Then, SomethingOthers 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.
—Robert Frost
