Day Thirteen

Dr. Talbot introduced me to this one. When critics of Robert Frost accused him of being a simple, backwoods poet, he responded by writing this poem in hendecasyllabic, the signature meter of the ancient Latin poet Catullus. It's eleven syllables following a pattern of three stressed, two unstressed, and then six syllables alternating stressed and unstressed. Crazy? Yes. Awesome? Absolutely.

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.