I Can’t Look Away From This Poem About Looking
Our critic A.O. Scott gazes into a well with Robert Frost.
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Isabella Cotier
By A.O. Scott
Aug. 27, 2025
Take a moment to reflect. That’s generally good advice. “For Once, Then, Something” is a reflection on reflecting — on looking and thinking — that teases the double meaning of the word without using it once.
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 .
The person speaking is musing on the act of looking down a well, seeing the image of his own face on the surface of the water. It turns out there’s quite a bit to ponder. This is a strange, difficult poem. That’s part of what makes it memorable, and powerful.
Neither the form nor the content is easy to grasp. The lines are literally — that is, numerically — odd. What looks at first glance as if it might be a sonnet has an extra, 15th line.
And each of those lines has 11 syllables, not the 10 you would expect if this were normal iambic pentameter.
Instead of rhymes, there are echoes: words that repeat at irregular intervals.
Beyond that technical stuff there is the peculiarity of what happens in the poem. Leaning over the sides of wells is an unusual pastime, even in rural New England. (“For Once, Then, Something” appeared in a 1923 book called “New Hampshire.”) For this person it seems to be something between a hobby and an obsession. He does it a lot.
Stranger still, these mysterious “others” — neighbors? friends? fellow well-gazers? — insist that he isn’t doing it right.
The first six lines — a single, nearly pauseless sentence — give voice to those unnamed critics, and also offer a defense against them.
Maybe this guy isn’t peering down the well the way they think he should, but what he sees — himself — is magnificent, like a celestial fresco in a church somewhere in Italy. Presented with such a stunning surface, a divine image of your own face, why would you want to look any deeper?
But deeper, nonetheless, is where we are supposed to go. That applies to readers of poems as much as to well-curb-kneelers. Frost is inviting us to take his eccentric enterprise as a metaphor, to find a philosophical, even spiritual dimension in this anecdote of redirected attention.
From the seventh line onward, the poem focuses on a time when he almost succeeded in looking the way the “others” thought he should. Beneath the mirrored portrait, he caught a glimpse of ... well, it’s not clear what.
“Something,” though. That word, which seems so vague, so casual, is the crux of the poem — its strongest, most insistent echo, sounding through the beginning, middle and end, anchoring the meaning.
“Something” interrupts the speaker’s contemplation of himself — but it’s gone in an instant, chased away by a falling droplet.
Only questions remain: What’s down there? Rocks? Answers? (Turtles?) He can’t be sure.
But he’s been shaken out of his solipsistic reverie. Not everything is about him.
Or maybe that’s just what he wants us to think he thinks. That “something” he says he saw that one time might be a pebble of piety tossed in the direction of his critics to get them off his back.
How well do we know this neighbor of ours? Frost is, by reputation, perhaps the foremost poet of rural, non-coastal New England — of birches and apple trees, of forests blanketed in snow, of pastures sliced by ragged stone walls, and of the flinty, self-sufficient kind of temperament that flourishes in those places.
His most familiar poems — “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall” and of course “The Road Not Taken” — seem to pluck worldly wisdom out of the chilly air. He has a reputation for homespun common sense, offered in reassuringly simple forms.
Robert Frost in New Hampshire, circa 1916.
Louis Untermeyer, via Michael J. Spinelli Jr. Center for University Archives and Special Collections, Plymouth State University.
But Frost, who attended Harvard, lived for a time in England and taught for many years at Amherst College, was hardly an unpolished rustic bard. “I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer,” he writes in “New Hampshire,” “With an income in cash of, say, a thousand / (From, say, a publisher in New York City).”
Nor was he a postcard poet, soothing readers with picturesque scenery. Frost’s pastoral landscapes are haunted by loss and shadowed by anxiety, doubt and dread. “The Road Not Taken” is more about ambivalence than self-reliance. His skepticism — about politics, religion, other people — trips over a faith that lies like a half-buried stone in his path. What is that man doing at the well? He could be praying.
Frost’s folksy conversational style is more complex than it seems. Here he’s drawing on two Classical Latin poets: Catullus, who specialized in those 11-syllable lines, and Ovid, who gave him his theme.
“For Once, Then, Something,” is transparently about narcissism, a word that Freud and other theorists of human psychology began to use in the early 20th century. They borrowed the term from Book 3 of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” which tells the story of Narcissus, a young man who falls in love with his own reflection.
A painting of Narcissus by Caravaggio (1571-1610).
Bridgeman Images
Frost’s well is a modern version of Narcissus’ pool, and his poem is a meditation on self-absorption and its limits. At the beginning, he’s tuning out the world, admiring the way the elements — sky, water, air — combine to give him back a picture of himself. Then something comes along to spoil the picture.
Something, or someone? In Ovid’s poem, Narcissus is loved by a nymph, whose name is Echo.
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 .
She is in this poem too — everywhere and nowhere, hiding in plain sight.
Those repetitions, resonating — echoing — through the lines remind us that we are not looking at a picture but hearing a voice, and that no voice is ever completely solitary.
There is another presence in this poem, but it isn’t down the well, where hidden meanings and mineral riddles are supposed to reside. It’s right there on the surface, in the sound of the words.
The story of Echo and Narcissus is a fable of unrequited, unacknowledged love, a tragedy of failed communication.
In retelling the tale, Frost casts himself in the role of Narcissus. The speaker, preoccupied with what others think and barely able to see past the image of his face, hears only his own voice.
In the course of the poem he discovers that he isn’t entirely alone. We’ve been right here, the whole time, looking over his shoulder and hearing his thoughts.
The poem isn’t all about him. It’s about us, too. Isn’t that something?
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 .
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